![]()
| A Sweet Dose of Reality Its official: Sweetener switch-ups are this summers most popular food fad. Since Starbucks first pushed that bandwagon forward a few weeks ago, labels advertising their contents as free of high fructose corn syrup have been all the rage among gimmick-prone shoppers. But the Chicago Tribune did sweetener fashion victims a favor yesterday by offering readers a spoonful of (gasp!) science. Contrary to what many labels have been implying lately, there is no proven health benefit to choosing table sugar over its corn-derived competitor. When Marion Nestle, Michael Jacobson, and other notoriously picky eaters call sugar marketers on their bluff, you know there must be something bitter behind high fructose corn syrup smears. As leading nutrition experts and even drink company representatives told the Tribune, its a marketing ploy.
United Press International took note this week also: The claim that beet sugar is healthier than high fructose corn syrup cant stand up to scientific scrutiny. So what is true about table sugar and high fructose corn syrup? Chemically, theyre almost identical. Table sugar is made of a half-and-half recipe of fructose and glucose. High fructose corn syrup, on the other hand, contains either 42 or 55 percent fructose which means that some varieties of the corn sweetener are actually lower in fructose than table sugar. As we argued in an East Valley Tribune op-ed this week, smart marketing doesn't change the facts. You won't be any healthier by banning high fructose corn syrup from your diet no matter what kind of sweet nothings your local barista whispers in your ear Know Thy Self, Know Thy Nanny What motivates the pushy puritans weve come to know as the Nanny State? Last week, we shared our thoughts with three other anti-nannyists on a KBDI-TV (PBS Denver) roundtable hosted by The Independence Institute. And as panelist Radley Balko pointed out, H.L. Mencken had a good sense of whats behind the we know whats best for you mentality. According to Mencken, the urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it. Fat bans, restaurant ordinances, and liquid sin taxes are among the many products of busybody bureaucrats that have proven Mencken right. But as fellow panelist David Harsanyi of The Denver Post pointed out and reiterated in his column this week nutrition zealots are delaying the inevitable. Everyones time on Earth is limited, and some of us are perfectly willing to make trade-offs. Its a decision that should be ours to make.
Take away all the rhetoric about externalities and what might buy us five more years in the nursing home, and what you have left is pure dietary puritanism. And, in Menckens words, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Or happily enjoying a cheeseburger and fries. Watch Independent Thinking in three segments on YouTube: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. 7 Things You Didn't Know About HSUS 2) Beginning on the day of NFL quarterback Michael Vicks 2007 dogfighting indictment, HSUS raised money online with the false promise that it would care for the dogs seized in the Michael Vick case. The New York Times later reported that HSUS wasnt caring for Vicks dogs at all. And HSUS president Wayne Pacelle told the Times that his group recommended that government officials put down (that is, kill) the dogs rather than adopt them out to suitable homes. HSUS later quietly altered its Internet fundraising pitch. 3) HSUSs senior management includes a former spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a criminal group designated as terrorists by the FBI. HSUS president Wayne Pacelle hired John J.P. Goodwin in 1997, the same year Goodwin described himself as spokesperson for the ALF while he fielded media calls in the wake of an ALF arson attack at a California veal processing plant. In 1997, when asked by reporters for a reaction to an ALF arson fire at a farmers feed co-op in Utah (which nearly killed a family sleeping on the premises), Goodwin replied, Were ecstatic. That same year, Goodwin was arrested at a UC Davis protest celebrating the 10-year anniversary of an ALF arson at the university that caused $5 million in damage. And in 1998, Goodwin described himself publicly as a former member of ALF. 4) According to a 2008 Los Angeles Times investigation, less than 12 percent of money raised for HSUS by California telemarketers actually ends up in HSUSs bank account. The rest is kept by professional fundraisers. And if you exclude two campaigns run for HSUS by the Build-a-Bear Workshop retail chain, which consisted of the sale of surplus stuffed animals (not really fundraising), HSUSs yield number shrinks to just 3 percent. Sadly, this appears typical. In 2004, HSUS ran a telemarketing campaign in Connecticut with fundraisers who promised to return a minimum of zero percent of the proceeds. The campaign raised over $1.4 million. Not only did absolutely none of that money go to HSUS, but the group paid $175,000 for the telemarketing work. 5) Research shows that HSUSs heavily promoted U.S. boycott of Canadian seafoodannounced in 2005 as a protest against Canadas annual seal huntis a phony exercise in media manipulation. A 2006 investigation found that 78 percent of the restaurants and seafood distributors described by HSUS as boycotters werent participating at all. Nearly two-thirds of them told surveyors they were completely unaware HSUS was using their names in connection with an international boycott campaign. Canadas federal government is on record about this deception, saying: Some animal rights groups have been misleading the public for years its no surprise at all that the richest of them would mislead the public with a phony seafood boycott. 6) HSUS raised a reported $34 million in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, supposedly to help reunite lost pets with their owners. But comparatively little of that money was spent for its intended purpose. Louisianas Attorney General shuttered his 18-month-long investigation into where most of these millions went, shortly after HSUS announced its plan to contribute $600,000 toward the construction of an animal shelter on the grounds of a state prison. Public disclosures of the disposition of the $34 million in Katrina-related donations add up to less than $7 million. 7) After gathering undercover video footage of improper animal handling at a Chino, CA slaughterhouse during November of 2007, HSUS sat on its video evidence for three months, even refusing to share it with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. HSUSs Dr. Michael Greger testified before Congress that the San Bernardino County (CA) District Attorneys office asked the group to hold on to the information while they completed their investigation. But the District Attorneys office quickly denied that account, even declaring that HSUS refused to make its undercover spy available to investigators if the USDA were present at those meetings. Ultimately, HSUS chose to release its video footage at a more politically opportune time, as it prepared to launch a livestock-related ballot campaign in California. Meanwhile, meat from the slaughterhouse continued to flow into the U.S. food supply for months. |