Starting around 1970, food manufacturers collectively began reducing product costs and increasing sales by switching their refined sugar ingredient to an inexpensive high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) sweetener. Together with the unlimited soda refill stations at fast food restaurants and quickie marts, a gold mine was born, which nearly guaranteed repeat business.
The addictive HFCS works to form new fat cells in the body and as we fast forward from 1970, these same sugary-filled product manufacturers want consumers to believe they have turned health conscious by switching from HFCS to using ‘real’ sugar. For example, PepsiCo just introduced three new soft drinks—Pepsi Natural, Pepsi Throwback, and Mountain Dew Throwback—each sweetened with a "natural" blend of cane and beet sugars. Hoodwinking people as refined sugar is the same health risk as HFCS, whether manufactured from a sugar beet/cane plant.
How do companies get away with such deception in advertising? Well, our U.S. Food & Drug Administration is a larger friend to business than consumers. It extends the right to use product descriptive words like natural and real, like the Snapple Company plans to promote a "natural" line of tea drinks brewed with "real" cane sugar. Knowing that beet or cane refined sugar is no safer to ingest than HFCS, because each contain similar amounts of fructose. Even the all-natural sweeteners used in health-food products and fruit drinks include concentrated apple or pear juices that contain almost two-thirds fructose. For proof, simply review the label on organic raw agave nectar and see its content is 90% fructose!
Type 2 diabetes increased largely at the same time HFCS came heavy on the market. High-fructose causes more visceral fat (the kind that adheres to internal organs), commonly associated with heightened risk for atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, LDL cholesterol, and lower level of insulin sensitivity.
Obese Americans number over 20 million, thereby making it easy to introduce any ultimate weight loss drug. Well, beware there is one called Contrave, made by Orexigen Therapeutics Inc., an antidepressant and addiction drug placed into one pill. Please excuse my intrigue with this name, but my observation is heightened since my son’s name is Trave, so I feel the prefix ‘Con’ means it is an anti-human drug.
Drugs are toxic and where this weight lose pill may represent the antidote to the high-fructose poisoning, it comes with numerous side effects. It will probably work on a percentage of the target population, however, there will be a large group of consumers that will be unaffected and merely represent a revenue stream for the maker.
The food and beverage industry is often hardhearted to reach optimum revenue goals. Wherever non-socially responsible companies can lower costs they will impose ingredients solely for increasing sales, regardless of potential negative outcome(s) to you, its customer.
