I had to laugh the other day.  First, I saw an open letter from someone in the Corn Refiners Association on the Food Consumer website Letter to the Editor from the Corn Refiners Association.  This person was nice enough to try to say that there is no difference betwen High Fructose Corn Syrup and other types of sweeteners like sugar and honey.  Then I read on Natural News (http://naturalnews.com) that a Seattle based natural grocery store is no longer carrying foods that contain high fructose corn syrup. 

 Ok, so I give.  If there is no difference between HFCS and sugar, why do we even have it?  Why must we mess with corn syrup by adding enzymes and whatnot to make this?  So it’s sweeter.  Big deal. 

Honestly, I won’t feed my kids anything with HFCS in it if I have a choice.  My daughter was asking for yogurt the other day, and it took forever to find one that didn’t have either aspartame or high fructose corn syrup in it.  A 3 year old doesn’t need either of these types of sweeteners.  I finally found a “natural” yogurt that was sweetened with sugar.  Not the best, but at least it’s sweet.  And it doesn’t taste like candy, it tastes like yogurt. 

 I suspect that the person posted that open letter to the editor because they’re afraid their sales of high fructose corn syrup are going to go down because no one wants anything to do with it.  Once people start trying to improve their health and the health of their families, they stop buying garbage like that.  With the natural foods movement, it’s even more pronounced that we’re moving away from that type of artificial sweetener.  Yes, I lump it in with things like aspartame/nutra sweet, sweet ‘n low and splenda (I can’t remember the real names of the sweeteners right now, I’ll look them up later).  I eat them only when I don’t have a choice.  Lately I’ve been sticking mostly to either honey or no sweetener at all in my drinks.

 Guess if their sales fail on the high fructose corn syrup front, they can start selling the corn as food again, huh?