Obesity in the developed nations is a long, tangled tale of self-interest.
(The impact on beekeeping comes and the end of the long tale.)
Some could blame two sets of farmers (corn and sugar cane), but these
farmers merely acted in their self interest, taking into account the US
Government price supports for their crops.
I would tend to file the story under "unintended consequences", with the
proximate force behind the whole mess being commodity price supports.
In the 1950s, US Agriculture Secretary Benson said to farmers, "Get big or
get out." (Many people blame Earl Butz for this phrase, but he merely
repeated what
Benson said 20 years before. Butz's actual contribution to the quote books
was the equally heartless phrase "Adapt or die".)
So, agribusiness as we know it got going, and they looked at the price
support programs, and saw that commodities, like corn, were the safest
business decision for them. Problem is, everyone did the same math, and
came to the same conclusions. Lots and lots of corn got planted, more every
year.
Not surprisingly, in the 1960s, corn prices tanked due to a massive
over-production of corn.
With corn so cheap, it was suddenly looked at as a raw material that could
be processed, rather than a food to be simply packaged, preserved and sold.
HFCS was developed as a way to make corn more "useful" to the processed-food
industry.
A corn-based sweetener was "cheaper" than other sweeteners mostly due to the
price supports and subsidies for USA corn farmers. (Protectionist sugar
tariffs
and price supports kept and still keeps the price of sugar higher in the USA
than anywhere else on the planet, making HFCS look even cheaper.)
Fast-forward to the 70s, when "fat" was targeted as a problem in the diets
of US citizens. Suddenly "low-fat" became the maketing mantra of nearly
every packaged-food company.
But take out the fat, and lots of packaged foods were tasteless as a result.
So what to add to get some flavor back into the product?
Artifical sweeteners were both expensive, and were tainted with scares over
the long-term impact of complex chemistry on humans.
(See http://bee-quick.com/reprints/sugar.pdf for a run-down on all the
"sweeteners" out there.)
The "answer" was HFCS.
Cheap, easy to work with, and "stable" in nearly all manufactured food
products.
Conspiracy theorists note: The "USDA Food Pyramid" and the "USDA
Commodities Price Support Program" both come from the same agency.
Could it be that economics and price support policy had an impact on health
policy? No tin-foil hat is required for this one.
The USDA Economic Resource Service says the average annual per-capita
consumption of HFCS among US citizen went from zero lbs 1966 to
63 lbs in 2001. During the same period, sugar intake decreased from nearly
100 lbs per person per year in 1966 to 64 pounds in 2001.
So, the total sugar consumption per person went from 100 lbs to 127 lbs (63
+ 64) from 1996 to 2001. An extra 27 lbs of sugar a year is a big
increase in calories, and it simply does not matter if those calories come
in the form of sugars (simple carbs) or more complex carbs, like bread.
Sugar carries 110 calories per ounce, so 27 lbs would be (110 * 16 * 27) =
47,520 calories! It would take 118 hours on an elliptical trainer to
work that extra 27 lbs of sugar off.
Given that the cheapest foods are so cheap due to the replacement of more
costly ingredients with HFCS, the bulk of that extra per-capita
27 lbs ends up being consumed by the less well-to-do among us. So, for the
first time in human history, the well-off are thin, fit and
"in shape", while the poor (not having health club memberships) are the fat
and out-of-shape ones. It used to be that only the rich could
eat well enough and often enough to be fat.
The backlash came in the form of the new USDA "Food Pyramid" (
http://bee-quick.com/reprints/pyramid.pdf ) where ALL "added sugars"
are condemned, tarring honey with the same brush as HFCS.
What the USDA now says about these "added sugars" is:
"Added sugars are sugars and syrups that
are added to foods or beverages during
processing or preparation. This does
not include naturally occurring sugars
such as those that occur in milk and fruits."
Cows get two food groups all to themselves, "meat", and "milk", while bees
don't even get credit for making a
"naturally occurring sugar". To add insult to injury, cows are credited for
naturally occurring sugars in milk!
Under these conditions, marketing honey becomes very... difficult.
Its enough to almost make one believe that the government should stay out
"price supports".
-- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l for rules, FAQ and other info ---
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