Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

High Fructose Corn Syrup IS Bad for Your Kidney, Liver and the Planet (but can be Funny Too)!

The original SHAMEFUL ad that was showing during the spring and early summer. Really.

Anyone with even a modicum of concern about what they eat (or what their family eats) has cut out high fructose corn syrup.

WHY is HFCS so bad for us? Mainly, because it’s processed, and processed foods are what are making us fat, by sneaking ingredients into our bodies that our bodies never evolved to digest. Michael Pollan has recommended eating foods with no more than a handful of ingredients and avoiding any ingredients our grandparents wouldn’t recognize; HFCS has never existed before human beings manufactured it for cheap sweetener. And it’s really cheap, meaning companies can easily add it to thousands of products that never even had sugar or sweetener in them to begin with (like potato chips)! In addition:

-High Fructose Corn Syrup is typically made from genetically-modified corn.

-HFCS has been linked to higher levels of kidney damage according to this study and to fatty liver disease in this study.

-Some HFCS has also been found to contain detectable levels of mercury (17 out of 55 products containing HFCS tested high on the charts for mercury). There are NO safe levels of mercury for women of childbearing age or children.

-It’s bad for our environment. “Most corn is grown as a monoculture, meaning that the land is used solely for corn, not rotated among crops. This maximizes yields, but at a price: It depletes soil nutrients, requiring more pesticides and fertilizer while weakening topsoil.”

-It is suggested that diabetics avoid it because they body doesn’t process it like sugar (glucose) which can wreak havoc on blood sugar levels.

-HFCS makes us fat. Long story short is that fructose, the sugar in HFCS, doesn’t stimulate leptin, a hormone which tells your body it’s full. So you’ve consumed a bunch of processed sugar-like calories, but your body doesn’t get the message, leading you to eat more calories. Fructose is also “an unregulated source of “acetyl CoA,” or the starting material for fatty acid synthesis. This, coupled with unstimulated leptin levels, is like opening the flood gates of fat deposition.”

But instead of responding appropriately to a cause of ill health and obesity, the corn industry has decided to try to justify it! You are on the WRONG side of history, folks. The people that are pushing HFCS as OK are in the same book as those folks who fought smoking bans for all those years. Shameful.

If you hear of scientific reports that say that HFCS is ok, check who’s behind that research (as the Mayo Clinic points out here). The food industry is rife with ‘reports’ put out by food manufacturers themselves, and as we saw with the tobacco industry reports saying smoking is ‘ok in moderation’ (the same claim HFCS folks are making here) I trust that data as far as I can throw it.

And while the evidence about HFCS and how unhealthy it is continues to mount, some comedians have taken the situation into their own hands. This is an hilarious parody of the Corn Refiner’s ad above.

And the HILARIOUS rebuttals. Gotta love a great satire. The second and third are priceless!

Food Democracy Now! Petition Sustainable Choices for the USDA

Food Democracy Now! is a grassroots campaign comprised of farmers, writers, activists, policy advocates and people who eat. A petition is circulating to bring our attention to the desperate need for sustainable practices regarding food. The Food Democracy Now! petition asks President-elect Barack Obama and newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack to consider leaders for the Under Secretary level who understand organic and sustainable agriculture.

While some are more concerned with the appointment of Vilsack, Dave Murphy of FoodDemocracyNow! remains hopeful;

We understand that many in the sustainable agriculture community are disappointed with President-elect Obama’s selection of former Iowan Governor as our next Secretary of Agriculture. Concern over his record regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the proliferation of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) during his time in office have given many in this community pause over the type of change he may be willing to implement as the head of the USDA. The fact is that many in Iowa who have worked with Gov. Vilsack in the past have always appreciated his willingness to listen to the concerns of family farm and rural advocates and believe that he may be able to realize more progressive change at the USDA as he will not be hampered by a Republican House and Senate as he was as governor. We are also encouraged by the fact that President-elect Obama has committed to payment limitations, eliminating subsidies for factory farms and labeling GMOs in the human food chain.

Twelve sustainable choices are listed at the end of the petition. FoodDemocracyNow! is working hard to get 100,000 signatures by January 1st, 2009. To join the likes of Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry and Eric Schlosser, just to name a few, SIGN IT!

350: Global Warming. Global Action. Global Future.

Last night I was reading my favorite magazine, Orion. Bill McKibben was discussing the campaign 350. From the website:

350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

But solutions exist. All around the world, a movement is building to take on the climate crisis, to get humanity out of the danger zone and below 350. This movement is massive, it is diverse, and it is visionary. We are activists, scholars, and scientists. We are leaders in our businesses, our churches, our governments, and our schools. We are clean energy advocates, forward-thinking politicians, and fearless revolutionaries. And we are united around the world, driven to make our planet livable for all who come after us.

We are everywhere, and together we are unstoppable.

We are currently living at 387ppm. Scientists claim numbers could reach 450-550ppm which would mean disaster for life as we know it. Every time we turn on a car, a light, the heat, the stove, the television, the computer; we partake. Unless we are receiving our power solely from renewables, then we are using coal and oil. The 350 campaign is hoping to influence lawmakers, political leaders, and individuals to take action. One view has perpetuated the notion that climate change, such as what we are experiencing now, is normal, just as ice ages come and go. However, the real science is in and it is time to listen, regardless of partisan politics.

Last week my extended family gathered. A discussion arose, among friends and family, about the fictionalized nature of global warming and how it is simply a marketing campaign so people can sell “green” products. Greenwashing exists. We know this. But this conversation, dominated by one in particular, was reiterating a denial about what is happening. My young cousin, who is twenty and overheard the discussion, told me she wasn’t sure. We had a decent conversation about some examples of climate change, what greenwashing means, and environmentalism in general. The information is out there. Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, Terry Tempest Williams, Treehugger, Grist, Adbusters, Huffington Post, ENN – just to name a few sources.

Is Green Too White?

In a recent article, “Beyond Eco-Apartheid,” Van Jones of Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights asks, “Is the environmental movement too white?”

According to Jones, “The LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) sector is growing like crazy…but unfortunately [it] is probably the most racially segregated part of the US economy.”

The article was originally written for Common Ground, but I found it posted at Truth Out, which collects lots of good cultural critics including Jessica Valenti, Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben & Bill Moyers.

(Acknowledgment: Thanks to the man paddling a canoe to Carl Ross Key island…)

Pollan Speaks Out

Grist has a great interview with Michael Pollan, author of the new book Omnivore’s Dilemma (I’m reading it now! So far, it’s pretty amazing…) in their newsletter this week. My favorite quote was Pollan’s assertion that the connections between what we eat and the environment are strong (duh), and tie people’s everyday habits to the natural world, since it’s easy to be distracted by all the bleeping, plastic things. 

Pollan also brings a great number to the fore: 20% of our fossil fuel use goes into food production/distribution, so what we eat not only has an impact on our health, pollution from pesticides, etc., but on global warming as well.

Food is also a great topic to broach to ‘break people in’ to the the environmental movement. Everyone needs to eat, and most people enjoy it! Pollan talks about organic food, the importance of local agriculture, and the impact of “convenience” foods on our health, sanity and the natural world at large.