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!

Welcome Eco Moms!

The team at Eco-Chick are very excited to have been mentioned in today’s New York Times’ article about Eco Moms!

For those of you new to Eco Chick, you can find all the “Mom” content by browsing the “Categories” section at right and checking the box next to “Green Mom”. There you’ll find a wealth of past articles about being a parent and raising your child in a healthy and sustainable way.

Kim Jordan Allen’s posts on Green toys and Inspirational Green Links for Green Moms are a great place to start.

The Kids Are Not Going to Be Alright: They're Going to Be Pissed

Several of my friends have had babies in the last few years, and some are on their second round already. Though it seems to me that there are far too many people on the planet already, it’s difficult to begrudge anyone the basic human drive to reproduce, and my friends’ kids ARE ridiculously cute. I’m pretty sure they are all genius artists who will invent the next version of rock ‘n roll and create world peace, too. But every time I play with them, surrounded as they typically are by plastic toys, educational videos and the other detritus of modern children’s lives, I look into their eyes and I know: in 20 years, they are going to hate us.

Of course all teenagers and college students hate their parents a little bit (or a lot, depending on the hormones), as it’s part of forging one’s own identity. Isn’t it the American way to hold your parents in contempt until you’re at least 25, and then become them?

But these kids are going to have good reason for their anger, and I predict a revolution when these tiny tots grow to understand the legacy their parents have left them. They will inherit a planet-wide environmental mess, and it might not be impossible to fix, but it’s going to take the best minds of their age (plus their offspring), lots of money, and a singular desperation to fix what’s wrong before it’s too late. What these kids face in the coming years will make the mistakes my generation has been left with: Rockefeller drug laws, repeated pointless wars in the Middle East, and lack of marriage rights for homosexuals, seem like quaint oopsies in comparison. They’ll be figuring out how to handle the planet-altering effects of massive droughts (hey, it’s already happening) and global warming has barely gotten underway), disintegration of ecological webs as species disappear during the current mass extinction, and human migration due to the effects of global warming, not to mention changes we can’t even foresee yet.

Well, you say, each generation has to pick up after the one prior to it in one way or another; what gives those kids in diapers more permission than anyone else to let us have it? The answer is that we know what we’re doing to the environment and we still continue to do it.

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Mortgaging Planet Earth

Whenever I start to feel a little cynical (depressed?) about being an environmentalist (i.e. whenever I get the urge to put on some snakeskin sneakers, wear diamonds bigger than my eyeballs, smoke CO2 cigarettes, and hop on my mahogany-furnished private jet to hurtle me and my friends around the world while drinking whiskey made from rare orchids just so I can finally stop crying about penguins and polar bears losing their habitats), an editorial like the one in today’s New York Times “Our Moral Footprint” by Vaclav Havel comes along, reminding me that I’m not the only one wishing people would stop arguing about global warming and start doing more than changing light bulbs. It’s analogies like these that give me hope that others will turn off their tvs, get out of their cars, and start paying back the earth for all we’ve borrowed …

Maybe we should start considering our sojourn on earth as a loan. There can be no doubt that for the past hundred years at least, Europe and the United States have been running up a debt, and now other parts of the world are following their example. Nature is issuing warnings that we must not only stop the debt from growing but start to pay it back. There is little point in asking whether we have borrowed too much or what would happen if we postponed the repayments. Anyone with a mortgage or a bank loan can easily imagine the answer.

The Car-free Life in Paris

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the trend toward building entire subdivisions as car-free communities here in Germany; though these neighborhoods eschew cars and roads for bikes and courtyards, they also offer a bit of storage space to house the bikes (either as covered garages or, in the single-family homes, on porches).

In larger, more compact cities, though, there often isn’t enough room for residents to keep their bikes inside and the threat of theft is too great to store bikes outside (nearly every person I’ve spoken to in Cologne has had a bike stolen – hence the preference for buying cheap, unexciting, used bikes instead of mountain or racing bikes). To keep people riding, then, cities like Copenhagen offer cycles free of charge to riders (the cost of the bike is supported by advertisements). All you need is a Euro coin as a deposit to unlock the bike; you get the coin back when the bike’s returned to a station in the city and locked anew.

photo (c) aisipos, via flickr creative commons

Lyon has a similar program, though you pay a small amount for each ride; it’s a popular way home for students after late-night dinners with too much wine. Now Paris is trying it out, too. From The New York Times:

The program, Vélib (for “vélo,” bicycle, and “liberté,” freedom), is the latest in a string of European efforts to reduce the number of cars in city centers and give people incentives to choose more eco-friendly modes of transport.

“This is about revolutionizing urban culture,” said Pierre Aidenbaum, mayor of Paris’s trendy third district, which opened 15 docking stations on Sunday. “For a long time cars were associated with freedom of movement and flexibility. What we want to show people is that in many ways bicycles fulfill this role much more today.”

Users can rent a bike online or at any of the stations, using a credit or debit card and leave them at any other station.

A one-day pass costs 1 euro ($1.38), a weekly pass 5 euros ($6.90) and a yearly subscription 29 euros ($40), with no additional charges as long as each bike ride does not exceed 30 minutes. (Beyond that, there is an incremental surcharge, to make sure that as many bikes as possible stay in the rotation.)

I’m really excited that this idea is catching on; wherever my husband and I travel, we rent bikes to get around the city and these ad-sponsored cycles take some of the worry out of having the bike stolen. And as tourists, we see more of the people, the architecture, and everyday life by bike than by subway, so it’s a treat I wouldn’t want to give up. I just hope someone brings this idea to the US soon … because while it’s easy enough to make the car-free lifestyle choice in your hometown, getting around as a tourist is a bit more difficult to do and a program like this takes some of the worries away. So you can spend more time indulging in the arts and wine and not worry about hitting the wrong Metro home or trying to navigate a hatchback down one-way streets cobbled together with tiny stones.