We're a corn nation -- and it's hurting our health
Pop quiz: Which of the following contains ingredients derived from corn? (a) Kellogg's Corn Flakes; (b) Pepsi; (c) Smucker's jam; (d) a McDonald's Big Mac; or (e) Wonder Bread.
Answer: all of them.
The American food supply, in fact, is awash in corn. In 2007, U.S. farmers reaped some 13 billion bushels of the yellow stuff -- the largest corn harvest on record, made possible in part by massive federal subsidies to corn farmers. Such bumper crops help keep corn prices -- and food prices in general -- down, but experts say that the glut of corn has so saturated our diet that it's harming our health.
One concern: We're guzzling far too much of that corn in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. The average American consumes a whopping 42 pounds of the economical sweetener each year, most of it in the form of sugary drinks. That's about 76,000 calories per year --enough to feed some men for about 29 days.
"If the average American could cut just one soft drink or sugared water drink a day, they would immediately cut out 10 pounds a year," says Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. Corn syrup is the most common sweetener in those drinks but plain old table sugar is just as bad, says Ronald Davis, president of the American Medical Association.
It's not just people who eat too much corn. The bulk of the nation's crop ends up feeding livestock, which can be cheaply fattened on corn. But beef from corn-fattened cattle tends to have more artery-clogging saturated fats than grass-fed beef, says Popkin. Research also suggests it's lower in certain healthful substances like omega-3 fatty acids. Ominously, researchers have even found that subsisting on corn makes the stomachs of cattle more acidic and thus more amenable to a deadly strain of E. coli.
Corn isn't inherently bad, says Aaron Woolf, director of the 2007 documentary King Corn. "The problem is the scale at which we produce it and the fact that it is so pervasive in our food supply."