6 ms·

Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain

45 points by tjr 17y ago

msluyter 17y ago
Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising. A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the same category as candy.
- timcederman 17y ago
  Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus resistant).
  - maxharris 17y ago
    Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be replicated from grafts. However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)
    - timcederman 17y ago
      I guess I was surprised by the example, as the modern commonplace banana (in the western world at least) is very static.
- paulbaumgart 17y ago
  UCSF's Dr. Lustig disagrees with that assessment. According to him, the fiber in fruit counteracts the negative effects of the fructose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
  - paulbaumgart 17y ago
    A more scientific assessment of a a few different types of fruits is here: http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/ http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
- illumin8 17y ago
  Fruit does have a lot of sugar, but it also has a lot of fiber in it which causes your body to process the sugar in a different, slower way. Drinking fruit juice, however, is just about as bad as drinking HFCS soda. Berries are truly awesome fruits. I eat blueberries almost every day, although it can be pretty expensive, especially during the winter when they have to ship them in from the southern hemisphere.
superjared 17y ago
One interesting part is that they used fewer calories of HFCS than sugar in the trial, yet it still prompted more weight gain.
- zackattack 17y ago
  This would make more sense if I had a better understanding of biochemistry. It's only a matter of time before an awesome explanation is posted. (Yes....!)
  - icey 17y ago
    It may be as simple as corn syrup causing the body to think it needs to store more fat for some reason or another.
  - maxharris 17y ago
    http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717 http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717 For what it's worth, I'm in my second semester of biochemistry, and we've studied almost every one of the pathways he talks about in our class, in detail. Dr. Lustig is dead on about the science behind obesity.
    - aik 17y ago
      Thanks for the link. That's a great lecture. Have more on this topic? Few points he talks about: - In processed/fast food foods, fiber is often taken out to make shipping easier and cooking faster. This is the only reason fiber isn't seen as an essential nutrient in this country. Without the fiber, the appetite doesn't get quenched as quickly (as the food doesn't go through you as quickly) and so you eat more. - Stress increases appetite. - Sugar, fructose, and high fructose corn syrup do not suppress the appetite either. Also, drinking/eating soda/juice/sugary foods with a meal delays the satiety signal. This means you don't feel the fullness as quickly when sweetness is in your food/drink and so you eat more. - Adding sugar to a salty food (and vice versa) neutralizes the salty/sweetness on your tongue. Companies often make use of this fact. For example, Coke has come out with new formulas where the only change is increased sodium and increased sugar/high fructose corn syrup to counterbalance. - High Fructose Corn Syrup was created in Japan. HFCS is so widely used because it is so super super cheap compared to other sweeteners. He jokes that Japan sent it to the US as revenge.
icey 17y ago
Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue to prop up the corn farmers.
- oconnor0 17y ago
  Maybe biofuel would be a good use of corn instead of HFCS. And the gov't could still subsidize that. Edit: That probably should have included an irony tag...
- maxharris 17y ago
  What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter or Paul.) The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.
  - hyperbovine 17y ago
    I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program. Irony.
    - maxharris 17y ago
      Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix? There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)
      - hyperbovine 17y ago
yanowitz 17y ago
This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon. If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.
- nas 17y ago
  That doesn't explain why HFCS should be worse that sucrose. It contains about the same about of fructose and according to Dr. Lustig the bound is very easy for the body to break. Regarding "The Bitter Truth", it's amazing to me that the fact that fructose is processed by the liver is not widely known. How could the medical community not know this for so long?
  - gte910h 17y ago
    Table sugar is sucrose. First off to turn sucrose into its component molecules, it must first undergo a reaction with a sucrase enzyme. So there is at least one metabolic step left out there. Studies are being done to test if Sucrase is actively regulated by the body or not. In either case, this metabolic step must occur, and can only occur so fast (limited by the amount of sucrase in your body), no matter how much sucrose you ingest. This means slower absorption of sucrose over HFCS as you get this with the whole load of glucose in HFCS instantly, but only see the sucrose's glucose released over time. Secondly, fructose has many forms. In sucrose, the fructose is often of the fructose-5 variety. In HFCS, it completely depends on the application, as any heat applied to a fructose-5 molecule upon separation from the glucose turns it into fructose-6. Fructose-6 is notably less sweet than Sucrose This means when used in heat processed goods, you use quite a bit more HFCS (including all baked goods, etc) then the equivalent amount of sucrose. This means more calories. Secondly, there are all different kids of HFCS. Notably, there is one with 38% less fructose than sucrose (HFCS 42), one with 22% more fructose than sucrose (HFCS 55) and one with 800% more fructose than table sugar (HFCS 90, often seen in diet foods I might add). They are all used for differing applications, but HFCS is not a single product, and most of the forms are likely metabolically worse in any amount of a single dose than the equivalent sweetness worth of sucrose. It is important you calculate your fractions correctly when realizing the differing amounts of fructose, as they're larger then they appear at first. One could say a steak and the meal in your small intestines are "about the same thing" but I doubt you'd want to eat it then, and you'd be as accurate as saying table sugar is basically HFCS 55 (all percentages are in terms of "per molecule of glucose", which is what appears to be important as per the evolving science of satiation)
elblanco 17y ago
I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats, the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy. About a year ago I figured it out and have systematically gone about trying to eliminate HFCS from almost everything I eat, which is easier said than done. In the U.S. at least, it seems to be in almost everything from Soda to Bread to Ketchup. I also notice that when I travel overseas, I can eat with relative abandon and not suffer any of the typical ill effects I have from HFCS loaded food in the States. I noticed within a week of doing this that I could actually get hungry again without getting "sick" and go thus go longer between meals. In the last year, I've lost about 15-20 pounds by just eliminating HFCS from my diet but not making any conscious effort to change my diet or exercise habits.
- illumin8 17y ago
  It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient: whatever you cooked. I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously surprised by the amount of people I see at work saying "I can never lose weight" - then I see them in the break room at lunch nuking a pakaged frozen dinner. Just stop, ask yourself "did my grandma eat this?" If the answer is no, then don't eat it. This is actually a great question to ask because it doesn't matter what culture you are from. People two generations ago didn't have access to food made in factories. It was all fresh from a farm, and it was good for us.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I actually saw raw Chicken breast in the grocery the other day that had HFCS in it. I have no idea why they felt the need to put that in the meat. I agree with you about whole foods. Getting the time to do that though is usually the problem. I get up at 6am and usually don't get back home till 9pm where I then have to do a bunch of other stuff (pay bills, do school work, etc.). I don't even know what I would do if I had kids. My wife shares a similar schedule. So getting time to cook stuff from scratch, which I love to do, is typically not possible. As a sad result, I find myself eating so many processed foods it's really rather sad. The good news is that I can still find a surprising number of processed food vendors that sell stuff that typically doesn't have HFCS in it, like Kashi. However, when I have slow stretches at work, I really enjoy cooking full meals and sitting out on my deck, enjoying the sun shine and a nice glass of wine with some roast duck, or home-made Shepherd's pie. And I feel better about life in general if I get to do that 2-3 times a week.
theli0nheart 17y ago
Who else paid immediate attention to the overly-staged photo?
tghw 17y ago
Take a look at http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/ http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/ It seems that Princeton's press release greatly overstated the results of the study. It also seems that there are some valid questions about the methodology of the study.
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  Reddit had a really great comment from someone who had actually read the study that seemed to point at some serious flaws.
zackattack 17y ago
Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up your claims with at the very least strong personal anecdotal evidence, e.g., "I feel extremely happy and energetic, yet I eat tons of meat and cheese." I'm reading a book that suggests that cooking food results in the denaturing of proteins, digestive enzymes, and other nutrients, and that makes a lot of sense to me. My primary goal is to improve energy levels.
- fleitz 17y ago
  Cooking food increases bio-availability of nutrients while decreasing the amount of nutrients present in food. Cooking food is believed to be one of the important factors that led to increased brain size in sapiens as it increased bio-availability of nutrients. Whether that increase is still relevant given the total availability food in modern society is debatable. These are general statements, in specific foods it may be preferable not to cook them. Certain foods such as chicken & pork should probably always be cooked. The basic premise is this, if you are going to eat 1 carrot you will get more nutrients from it being cooked. The real question is whether it is better to eat 1 cooked carrot or two uncooked carrots. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of having two carrots available so cooking was much preferable.
- e1ven 17y ago
  I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon, but the low-carb diet, while very much not a raw-food lifestyle, is working well for me.
  - illumin8 17y ago
    What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch leaves you dragging because you're eating bad carbs which are quickly metabolized into sugar in your blood, causing an insulin reaction and subsequent crash shortly later.
axiom 17y ago
Um, wasn't that kind of the point of corn subsidies? It really wasn't that long ago when the biggest problem in the lower class wasn't being too fat, but rather being too thin. Certainly this is a cause for concern, but keep in mind that there are worse things than having too much fat and too much leisure time.

45 points by tjr 17y ago

Having lost a lot of weight on a paleo-ish diet, I don't find this surprising. A related note: fruit, while generally considered good for you, also has a lot of sugar/fructose. In particular, the process of selective breeding has made fruits like bananas ever sweeter, much more so that our primitive ancestors would have encountered. Now I consider most of it (aside from berries) in the same category as candy.

timcederman 17y ago
Selective breeding of bananas? Culinary bananas are sterile and grown exclusively from cuttings. Also, the Cavendish is a lot less sweet than the previous banana of choice, the Gros Michel (which was sadly not as fungus resistant).
- maxharris 17y ago
  Yes, like most fruits, bananas are sterile polyploids that have to be replicated from grafts. However, the intent of his post is still correct - these grafts are selected to ensure high sweetness and sugar content. It's not very different with other commercial fruits (See Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire for a similar story on apples.)
  - timcederman 17y ago
    I guess I was surprised by the example, as the modern commonplace banana (in the western world at least) is very static.
paulbaumgart 17y ago
UCSF's Dr. Lustig disagrees with that assessment. According to him, the fiber in fruit counteracts the negative effects of the fructose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
- paulbaumgart 17y ago
  A more scientific assessment of a a few different types of fruits is here: http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/ http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
illumin8 17y ago
Fruit does have a lot of sugar, but it also has a lot of fiber in it which causes your body to process the sugar in a different, slower way. Drinking fruit juice, however, is just about as bad as drinking HFCS soda. Berries are truly awesome fruits. I eat blueberries almost every day, although it can be pretty expensive, especially during the winter when they have to ship them in from the southern hemisphere.

superjared 17y ago

One interesting part is that they used fewer calories of HFCS than sugar in the trial, yet it still prompted more weight gain.

zackattack 17y ago
This would make more sense if I had a better understanding of biochemistry. It's only a matter of time before an awesome explanation is posted. (Yes....!)
- icey 17y ago
  It may be as simple as corn syrup causing the body to think it needs to store more fat for some reason or another.
- maxharris 17y ago
  http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717 http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717 For what it's worth, I'm in my second semester of biochemistry, and we've studied almost every one of the pathways he talks about in our class, in detail. Dr. Lustig is dead on about the science behind obesity.
  - aik 17y ago
    Thanks for the link. That's a great lecture. Have more on this topic? Few points he talks about: - In processed/fast food foods, fiber is often taken out to make shipping easier and cooking faster. This is the only reason fiber isn't seen as an essential nutrient in this country. Without the fiber, the appetite doesn't get quenched as quickly (as the food doesn't go through you as quickly) and so you eat more. - Stress increases appetite. - Sugar, fructose, and high fructose corn syrup do not suppress the appetite either. Also, drinking/eating soda/juice/sugary foods with a meal delays the satiety signal. This means you don't feel the fullness as quickly when sweetness is in your food/drink and so you eat more. - Adding sugar to a salty food (and vice versa) neutralizes the salty/sweetness on your tongue. Companies often make use of this fact. For example, Coke has come out with new formulas where the only change is increased sodium and increased sugar/high fructose corn syrup to counterbalance. - High Fructose Corn Syrup was created in Japan. HFCS is so widely used because it is so super super cheap compared to other sweeteners. He jokes that Japan sent it to the US as revenge.

icey 17y ago

Unfortunately, I don't see the amount of HFCS that's used in the American food system changing much; at least until the government can find a way to continue to prop up the corn farmers.

oconnor0 17y ago
Maybe biofuel would be a good use of corn instead of HFCS. And the gov't could still subsidize that. Edit: That probably should have included an irony tag...
maxharris 17y ago
What you should argue for is that the government stop subsidizing farmers (and everyone else) altogether. That way, you don't have to worry about unintended consequences inherent in any subsidy program. (Nothing bad happens when you don't rob Peter or Paul.) The important thing is not the political reality of the moment, but the philosophy people go by in the future.
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  I seem to recall the very Internets on which you are now ranting arising out of a government-subsidized research program. Irony.
  - maxharris 17y ago
    Sure. But do you really think that the only possible technologies that could give you the features of the current internet are TCP, IP and Unix? There are lots of ways to do networking, and government subsidy didn't pay for all of them. (Even if HTTP didn't exist, gopher would have filled in just fine!) Nor did it pay for the commercialization of the web browser, which is what made it truly practical for people to use the web. (Remember that before Netscape, browsers from academia didn't support JPEG, and javascript hadn't been invented yet.)
    - hyperbovine 17y ago

yanowitz 17y ago

This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon. If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.

nas 17y ago
That doesn't explain why HFCS should be worse that sucrose. It contains about the same about of fructose and according to Dr. Lustig the bound is very easy for the body to break. Regarding "The Bitter Truth", it's amazing to me that the fact that fructose is processed by the liver is not widely known. How could the medical community not know this for so long?
- gte910h 17y ago
  Table sugar is sucrose. First off to turn sucrose into its component molecules, it must first undergo a reaction with a sucrase enzyme. So there is at least one metabolic step left out there. Studies are being done to test if Sucrase is actively regulated by the body or not. In either case, this metabolic step must occur, and can only occur so fast (limited by the amount of sucrase in your body), no matter how much sucrose you ingest. This means slower absorption of sucrose over HFCS as you get this with the whole load of glucose in HFCS instantly, but only see the sucrose's glucose released over time. Secondly, fructose has many forms. In sucrose, the fructose is often of the fructose-5 variety. In HFCS, it completely depends on the application, as any heat applied to a fructose-5 molecule upon separation from the glucose turns it into fructose-6. Fructose-6 is notably less sweet than Sucrose This means when used in heat processed goods, you use quite a bit more HFCS (including all baked goods, etc) then the equivalent amount of sucrose. This means more calories. Secondly, there are all different kids of HFCS. Notably, there is one with 38% less fructose than sucrose (HFCS 42), one with 22% more fructose than sucrose (HFCS 55) and one with 800% more fructose than table sugar (HFCS 90, often seen in diet foods I might add). They are all used for differing applications, but HFCS is not a single product, and most of the forms are likely metabolically worse in any amount of a single dose than the equivalent sweetness worth of sucrose. It is important you calculate your fractions correctly when realizing the differing amounts of fructose, as they're larger then they appear at first. One could say a steak and the meal in your small intestines are "about the same thing" but I doubt you'd want to eat it then, and you'd be as accurate as saying table sugar is basically HFCS 55 (all percentages are in terms of "per molecule of glucose", which is what appears to be important as per the evolving science of satiation)

elblanco 17y ago

I notice that if I have lots of HFCS items I suffer from semi-diabetic type symptoms if I go too long without food: an urgent desire to eat, cold sweats, the shakes, blurry vision, etc. It's usually not too bad, but sometimes can pretty much take me out of commission. For years, before I figured out it was HFCS, I tried to deal with it by constantly eating which made me very heavy. About a year ago I figured it out and have systematically gone about trying to eliminate HFCS from almost everything I eat, which is easier said than done. In the U.S. at least, it seems to be in almost everything from Soda to Bread to Ketchup. I also notice that when I travel overseas, I can eat with relative abandon and not suffer any of the typical ill effects I have from HFCS loaded food in the States. I noticed within a week of doing this that I could actually get hungry again without getting "sick" and go thus go longer between meals. In the last year, I've lost about 15-20 pounds by just eliminating HFCS from my diet but not making any conscious effort to change my diet or exercise habits.

illumin8 17y ago
It's easy to remove HFCS from your diet: Just eat whole foods. You really don't want all the chemicals in processed foods anyway. If you just eat fresh vegetables, fruits, meats, and whole grains you won't ever have to worry about what's hidden in the ingredients because there is only one ingredient: whatever you cooked. I know, easier said than done, especially since it requires a little cooking, but I'm seriously surprised by the amount of people I see at work saying "I can never lose weight" - then I see them in the break room at lunch nuking a pakaged frozen dinner. Just stop, ask yourself "did my grandma eat this?" If the answer is no, then don't eat it. This is actually a great question to ask because it doesn't matter what culture you are from. People two generations ago didn't have access to food made in factories. It was all fresh from a farm, and it was good for us.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I actually saw raw Chicken breast in the grocery the other day that had HFCS in it. I have no idea why they felt the need to put that in the meat. I agree with you about whole foods. Getting the time to do that though is usually the problem. I get up at 6am and usually don't get back home till 9pm where I then have to do a bunch of other stuff (pay bills, do school work, etc.). I don't even know what I would do if I had kids. My wife shares a similar schedule. So getting time to cook stuff from scratch, which I love to do, is typically not possible. As a sad result, I find myself eating so many processed foods it's really rather sad. The good news is that I can still find a surprising number of processed food vendors that sell stuff that typically doesn't have HFCS in it, like Kashi. However, when I have slow stretches at work, I really enjoy cooking full meals and sitting out on my deck, enjoying the sun shine and a nice glass of wine with some roast duck, or home-made Shepherd's pie. And I feel better about life in general if I get to do that 2-3 times a week.

theli0nheart 17y ago

Who else paid immediate attention to the overly-staged photo?

tghw 17y ago

Take a look at http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/ http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/ It seems that Princeton's press release greatly overstated the results of the study. It also seems that there are some valid questions about the methodology of the study.

houseabsolute 17y ago
Reddit had a really great comment from someone who had actually read the study that seemed to point at some serious flaws.

zackattack 17y ago

Can someone in the know please express their opinion on the raw food lifestyle? If you're going to dismiss it as ridiculous I'd like you to back up your claims with at the very least strong personal anecdotal evidence, e.g., "I feel extremely happy and energetic, yet I eat tons of meat and cheese." I'm reading a book that suggests that cooking food results in the denaturing of proteins, digestive enzymes, and other nutrients, and that makes a lot of sense to me. My primary goal is to improve energy levels.

fleitz 17y ago
Cooking food increases bio-availability of nutrients while decreasing the amount of nutrients present in food. Cooking food is believed to be one of the important factors that led to increased brain size in sapiens as it increased bio-availability of nutrients. Whether that increase is still relevant given the total availability food in modern society is debatable. These are general statements, in specific foods it may be preferable not to cook them. Certain foods such as chicken & pork should probably always be cooked. The basic premise is this, if you are going to eat 1 carrot you will get more nutrients from it being cooked. The real question is whether it is better to eat 1 cooked carrot or two uncooked carrots. Our ancestors didn't have the luxury of having two carrots available so cooking was much preferable.
e1ven 17y ago
I've lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months by following a very low-carb diet (Under 20G / day), and I've never felt more energetic. I've been eating lots of heavily processed meats and cheeses every day- Keilbasa, Havarti, Cheddar, and Summer Sausages. Even during the first week, I felt more awake and alert than I had eating a carb-heavy diet. A carb-heavy lunch left me dragging a bit in the afternoon, but the low-carb diet, while very much not a raw-food lifestyle, is working well for me.
- illumin8 17y ago
  What's your cholesterol like? I imagine it's pretty bad, eating mostly meats and cheeses. You can eat carbs, just eat good ones. Good ones being whole grains and legumes, not ground wheat flour. Stay away from pasta and breads (except sprouted wheat berry bread is ok), eat real good carbs like steel cut oats, buckwheat, quinoah, wild rice, brown rice, etc, along with fresh vegetables and fruits. The carb heavy lunch leaves you dragging because you're eating bad carbs which are quickly metabolized into sugar in your blood, causing an insulin reaction and subsequent crash shortly later.

axiom 17y ago

Um, wasn't that kind of the point of corn subsidies? It really wasn't that long ago when the biggest problem in the lower class wasn't being too fat, but rather being too thin. Certainly this is a cause for concern, but keep in mind that there are worse things than having too much fat and too much leisure time.