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I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for co
by stevenwoo 2y ago
I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for consumers to cook at home in the USA, industrial scale food production in the USA also benefits from HFCS subsidies and becomes additional lobbyists for HFCS and worm their way into recommended diets and become suppliers to public school cafeteias. We are all raised on very sweet breakfast cereals (at least in my public school cafeterias) from a very young age going from K-12 and continuing through cafeterias through college and kids have traditionally been taught fruit good but not juice bad so a lot of consumption via disposable drink boxes as well for a long time - I dunno if recent generations have been able to break any of these things starting kids off on sugar in large scale way.
- yowayb 2y agoIt's not just the USA. Vietnam and Turkiye use lots of sugar in non-traditional foods while Thailand has included palm sugar in even their traditional foods for as long as I can remember.
- stevenwoo 2y agoYes, though American portion sizes are huge as others noted. I remember some report about how Mexico had a very different rate of obesity from the USA until some of the free trade agreements kicked in and multinational food companies with USA branches started getting a bigger share in the Mexican market, ending up with the Mexican diet resembling more of the USA diet.
- yowayb 2y agoInteresting! I have no evidence but I got the impression that Turkiye's sugar industry (the richest man owns Ülker, a confectionary conglomerate) was unnaturally large and not always that way...
- stevenwoo 2y agoI could not find the recent article I heard on the radio but this covers it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/05/522038318/how-diabetes-got-to-be-the-no-1-killer-in-mexico https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/05/5220383... and there's a separate wikipedia entry just for obesity in Mexico, it's hit them so hard, it's like a hotbed for studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Mexico