The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 5 of 10: Republic of Fat
November 24, 2009 by dr. lam
What is very interesting is that a couple hundred years ago when our founding fathers brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, they also brought forth a ton of booze. That’s right. Pollan shows how up until about the time of prohibition (and perhaps thereafter for a while as well), we were inundated with cheap corn whiskey, so that typical Americans drank alcohol for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and oh I forgot at eleven am (called the elevenses), what we would call our coffee break.
The same problem has plagued the United States since the 1970s but of a different variety. Now cheap, subsidized corn has led most U.S. residents not to out drink themselves (although some do that well) but to eat themselves into an early grave. In fact, the thought today is that children born after the year 2000 may have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, a landmark first in the history of mankind.
A lot of that corn we ingest comes in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS. 1980 was a watershed year. That is the year that Coca-Cola switched from pure cane sugar to HFCS and Pepsi followed suit shortly thereafter. No one complained or even noticed. What is the big deal anyway? Aren’t sugar and HFCS pretty much the same? Actually, yes. However, what happened was that tariffs that the corn lobby imposed on sugar made HFCS a few cents cheaper to make. Realizing that most consumers would not buy another bottle of coke just because of this marginal cost savings, the soda manufacturers upsized all the drinks from, e.g., 8 oz. to 32 oz. servings and charged an incremental premium for this bonus surplus. Most Americans favored the extra size and guzzled accordingly. What is shocking is that even though our HFCS intake since 1985 went from 45 to 66 pounds per person per annum, that is not at the expense of other sweeteners. In fact, we have enlarged our intake of all sweeteners (cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, maple syrup, etc.) from 128 to 158 pounds per year. We are in short supersizing everything.
We owe a lot to David Wallerstein who invented supersizing at McDonald’s. Ray Kroc simply did not believe that people would consume more if they were given larger portions. It is now known that we can consume 30% more if we simply see more on our plate, almost as a biological response to scarcity. Kroc changed his tune when Wallerstein reported people were scrounging around their tiny french fry bags because having 2 sodas or 2 bags of french fries was self-deemed gluttony. Having a large bag of fries on the other hand was simply no big deal. Wallerstein, until his passing in 1993, worked in a Texas movie chain before his stint at McD’s and helped people see that individuals would consume any size bag of anything so long as it was in a single container. Once you ordered two small bags of popcorn, you would think yourself more of a gourmand than the abstemious Puritan that we desired to be.
In short, we are in our predicament because of the flood of cheap corn that is so readily available making us spend less on our food and desire to eat even more of it not out of necessity but because it is there.
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2 Responses to “The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 5 of 10: Republic of Fat”
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lol Great information! I don’t know if you meant this subject to be funny, Dr. Lam, but I laughed…lol Poor Americans! We sure got problems!…lol
Yes, I’ve quit consuming HFCS years ago. Because I’ve heard but I can’t quote any sources, that HFCS adds so much sugar to our systems at once when we consume it that our insulin has to immediately convert it to fat instead of allowing it to be energy and our pancreas has to work overtime to secrete enough insulin to take care of the high sugar level in our blood, increasing our chances of diabetes as well as making that energy (calories from the HFCS) worthless, because we are not using it but just storing it as fat. This in turn, causes us to be more hungry because it messes up our blood sugar levels and causes us to be driven to eat more because we didn’t get any energy from the source.
Very educational blog, Dr. Lam!!!
glad you are already practicing that heather!!!