rebuttal (rightward shift pt. 2)

whew! i've gotten more than a few responses to my chosen position on the HFCS debate. apparently, it is disconcerting to my friends, and i appreciate the concern.  i'm not going to one day wake up in Pat Robertson's bed, i don't think, but i've come to understand that sometimes, nay, often, what seems like the obvious "right thing to do" has unforeseen consequences.

2010 for me is to be a year of challenging my belief systems. i have hundreds of deeply entrenched dogmatic beliefs on which i base my most of my actions and values. my conscious and subconscious reactions to people, situations, the world around me, are going to stem from these sacredly held core ideas.

and alot of them are just wrong. or under-examined, or both.

for example, i spent my entire adult life, from approximately age 13 to age 33, a staunch atheist. i could (and would) argue the nonexistence of God with anybody that would stand still. when i began my journey in substance abuse recovery, it was suggested i ought to reexamine that belief and see if i couldn't find some concept of God that worked for me, because it just makes the process less painful & more successful in the long run. i had a number of profound awakenings in a short span of time that convinced me that God is indeed a factor in my life, the lives of every being on the planet, and throughout the universe. i no longer belabor the point to anybody, however, because i realize that the spiritual paths we all take are different. i had to first be willing to examine my own core beliefs in order for any shift to occur, though.

so back to the HFCS debate. it would be easy enough for me to jump on the bandwagon and say, "hell yeah we need to ban it! it is horrible stuff and makes people fat and gives 'em the diabeetus! and obviously America isn't smart enough to realize it!" i've been on that bandwagon before, and it is littered with overly simplistic "solutions" to terrible problems. Newton's Third Law of Motion says, "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." i think this law applies to more than just physics.

take a look at the graph to the right. it represents, as the title states, "U.S. per capita food consumption - Sugar and sweeteners." i think it is also posted on the PAGE OF THE FACEBOOK GROUP THAT STARTED THIS DIALOGUE. the convergence of the blue and green lines would seem to indicate a broad switch to HFCS in the last two decades. no brainer, right? we've already established the HFCS is cheaper, so that makes sense.

after having done some research, i found that high-fructose is no "sweeter" than granular sugar, and contains the same number of calories per gram, despite what many proponents of the "BAN" would implicate in their hastily-researched diatribes. in most breads and non-liquids, it is used in a less-potent concentration than white sugar. hmm. nonetheless, the convergence of the two lines is not the important piece of data. the red line at the top is. it indicates that Americans' overall demand for sugar had steadily risen to about the year 2000, then declined somewhat in the early "oughts." i would be interested to see the graph for the rest of the decade, myself, to see if the downward trend continued.

regardless, it is also important to point out that this is per capita data, in the same timeframe, the population of the U.S. had increased by 20% - from roughly 226 million to 281 million. now imagine the blue line of per capita solid sugar consumption if there were no green line, assuming the red line remains unchanged. it would have to represent the totals of HFCS and sugar consumed per capita, correct? also in my independent research, i found out that sugar only grows in selected climates, and its production and process is already having some pretty significant environmental impacts in those areas. so i have a single question: what do you think would happen to the agricultural landscape in those (largely second- and third-world) tropical, (relatively) underdeveloped areas of current sugar harvesting if demand in arguably the most sugar-insatiable nation in the world suddenly doubled?

i'm not invested in winning any argument - not this time, anyway. i'm only trying to illuminate the fact that there are no simple solutions. i am also aware of the irony in my decidedly right-wing response of "please stop parroting the things you hear on the interwebz and start thinking for yourselves."