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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why people act like we're talking about saffron when it comes to sugar. It's dirt cheap and costs cents per pound.

Corn syrup could disappear overnight and nothing would change about how much junk food we eat, how much we produce, nor how sweet it is.

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So you think producers are putting corn syrup in food just for kicks?

No, ostensibly it's cheaper at scale. But from a consumer's perspective, it doesn't matter that they're using that instead of sugar. There's a much larger conversation to be had about the misinformation surrounding sugar and carbohydrates, but anyways..

No. They're doing it because it's marginally cheaper and more convenient in the aggregate, but if they didn't and stuck to cane sugar, the practical difference on the consumer side in terms of consumption and price per product would be essentially nil or close enough not to matter.

It's not about displacing other sugars. It's a cheap substitute for things not sugar. The argument about corn syrup is misplaced, it should be about sugars in general in US processed food. But corn syrup just happened to be that sugar.

If the actual total sugar (or sugarlike) content decreased along with the corn syrup, there definitely would be differences.

Ask anyone who's visited the US about how the food tastes. It's not just that serving portions are much bigger, but everything just tastes sweeter too. I've had people tell me they visited the states and even the plain white bread was sweet in comparison to everywhere else.

This. Mainstream food in the US is unbearably sweet and sugary if you come from anywhere else in the world. Drinks are sweet. Chips are sweet. The deep fried onions at Olive Garden are sweet. The gravy for the prime rib is sweet. The goddamn bagels are sweet. They put marshmallows on top of baked sweet potatoes for thanksgiving.

The pancakes are sweet! The french toast is sweet! Even the General Tso's chicken is sweet!

Those would be sweet anywhere. Except General Tso which doesn’t exist outside the US because it’s an overly sweet abomination.

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