Sugar is Sugar.

..How I loathe this commercial so much.

Yes, nobody's arguing that corn syrup is pretty much nothing but sugar. Now please address why its in every product under the sun Corn Industry.

Aren't narrowly-targeted crop subsidies great? :)

I just watched that commercial. I'm not exactly sure wtf the point of it was.

Yes ♥
I'll do my best as your wife...

Wait... wrong sugar.

edited 27th May '11 9:03:38 AM by deuxhero

I'm pretty sure the only discernible point of it I can garner is "corn sugar is just like real sugar. therefore its nothing bad if corn sugar is in your product. yay!"

Well, as far as I know it's not. I'm not an expert on the subject but I heard corn sugar is digested differently from other sugars.

So are most types of sugars.

The problem is either way, it oversteps the real problem with feelgood images of a smiling farmboy in a sunlit field.

Corn sugar being processed differently or not isnt the real issue. The real issue is corn sugar is a filler in every single processed product under the sun, leading to massive daily overdoses of sugar.

Also it sidesteps a little noticed fact: even though it's all sugar, and required to be listed on ingredients labels, food companies got away with a bit of mathematical trickery. By breaking down the various sources of sugar into "sugar", "corn syrup", "high fructose corn syrup", etc., they got to move them down the list, which has to be sorted by how much of it's in the product. If you add all them up, it places much higher, maybe high enough to reveal that sugar is the first ingredient in a lot of what we eat.

In short, it's verbal legerdemain designed expressly to conceal how much sugar people are really eating. But now that people have forgotten this, food producers are pulling a bait-and-switch by trying to say, "Well, really they're all the same thing anyway." Thank you, short consumer memories.

As if it wasn't bad enough that Hitler liked the stuff.

edited 27th May '11 10:25:22 AM by victorinox243

It's all governments fault for stealing money to give to corn farmers. Otherwise they might grow *gasp* actual sugar or something else, but won't because corn is profitable because your money is stolen and given to them if they grow corn.

edited 27th May '11 10:38:36 AM by deuxhero

Are you really serious?

You can't grow sugar cane in the same places you grow corn.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of HFCS, either.

Hawaii used to have a real good sugar plantation thign going, decades ago. C&H Sugar? That statnds for California and Hawaii. our sugar plantations are now laying fallow. They mowed down a bunch of leftover wild cane to plant corn. Corn is brutal on soil; depletes it and stuff.

At least cane could survive as pretty much as a weed.

Isn't there a long list of various sugars? Lactose, fructose, glucose, sucrose, and stuff I'm forgetting? They're not really the same, although they are more or less interchamgeable in terms of matabolism, yes?

Beets are sweet. Plus the pulp makes great rust remover.

I don't know, very few people can metabolize lactose effectively.

^^Oh, so you can grow corn where you'd normally grow cane? Huh. Is the reverse true?

^Sugar beets are a growing industry.

edited 27th May '11 11:07:44 AM by HungryJoe

Sugar used to be real popular product around here (what with this being Sugar Land and all).

There's also Sucralose (Splenda), but how you want to classify it is up to you.

I'm not sure if you can grow cane where you grow corn. Industrial sugarcane production is also pretty brutal on the land - or was, with old production methods.

The reasoning as to why Hawaii killed their plantations is actually pretty interesting: Took up a lot of land, statehood got rid of indentured servanthood, the caste system that many plantation owners used went bye-bye, worker strikes, the shift to tourism and other economic factors lal played a role in the death of nearly all plantations.

Hawaiian Creole, also known as pidgin, is a polyglot cmop suey of Cantonese, Filipino, Chinese, Hawaiian and other languages, as an intermediary language amongst the workforce.

Still, I recall being on the eastern side of Oahu and being able to find fields of weed-like cane sugar growing along the sides of the dirt roads we were using (army training exercise) and we all jumped out and grabbed a few stalks and NOM'd on them for awhile. Nice and sweet, but all you could do was chew on it; almost impossible to actually eat the stuff raw.

Sugar cane cultivation and corn cultivation.

Seems you can grow it in similar climates, both requiring moderate temperatures.

Could you grow cane in Iowa?

Maybe? The places it's grown seem to be tropical, but that may just be a cost effectiveness thing.

And my quick trip to The Other Wiki says Iowa gets enough rain. I've got no idea if the dirt is the same though, I'm not an agricultural specialist.

edited 27th May '11 12:39:36 PM by Deboss

Cane in Iowa is probably asking a bit too much, but Sorghum is grown in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and other such places. Sweet Sorghum is grown in Kentucky.

Whether or not the US can make a go with Sugar Cane is an open question, Brazil does great by it, but they're a little closer to the equator. Their weather is also a little better, with their growing season near year round.

Switchgrass is the more popular fantasy crop, but they're still working on ways to make it efficient.

Not that this really matters for the real problem, which is a bunch of annoying advertising mavens selling their sewage.

Blech!

May someone please post a link to the commercial on You Tube for those of us that don't live in Eagleland?

edited 27th May '11 12:47:27 PM by MilosStefanovic

i'd rather spare you the brainwashing.

whatisthisidonteven

I don't understand it. Sure, maybe it's the same as normal sugar, but no doctor is going to tell you it's fine to have cane sugar be a prominent ingredient in every single thing you eat. It may be fine "in moderation", as those advertisements like to say, but the whole problem is it's virtually impossible to consume in moderation, especially if you don't have the time to make everything you eat yourself.

Or anything you eat for that matter.