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Comment by ahoyhere | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the wording is sketchy, but are you aware…

* one of the reasons HFCS is so prevalent in the US is because it's effectively government subsidized? * which is also why the worst foods are often the cheapest? * that HFCS is in all kinds of food you'd never expect, like "grilled" chicken in the salads at mid-level (or worse yet, fast food) restaurants?

If you're a label reader, you will find HFCS in a million places it oughtn't be. Since nobody expects their grilled chicken strips to stuffed with sugar, they are being tricked -- an angry person might say "force-fed."

"Big Food" may be inflammatory but it's also true, in this case. Agribusiness is an enormous industry and in the top 10 lobbyist groups in the US.

Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

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Evidence does not suggest that high-fructose corn syrup is any unhealthier than other sugars. The problem isn't so much HFCS as the consumption of refined sugars without the fibrous padding that accompanies them in nature. Note that sucrose is almost immediately broken down into glucose and fructose in your gut.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991323/ Health implications of fructose consumption: A review of recent data (2010)

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup_and_he...

"The first study showed that male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas."

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/inde...

Not saying one two-part study alone is everything, but it's also not nothing.

That study doesn't say anything as to whether high-fructose corn syrup is unhealthier than regular syrup. That study's only claim is that mice gain more weight if they eat high-fructose corn syrup compared to normal syrup. I think they could have probably counted the calories within each sample and saved everyone a lot of time.

And who's to say additional weight gain is bad for those mice? Mammals in a cold climate might appreciate the additional weight gain.

From the article: "[The study] demonstrated that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup ... gain significantly more weight than those with access to water sweetened with table sugar, even when they consume the same number of calories."

So, they did indeed count the calories and the result seems to indicate something about HFCS encourages rats to gain weight in a way that standard table sugar does not.

Your quote is from the caption, the actual article gives no indication of caloric intake.

More importantly, you are just repeating the line that high fructose corn syrup causes more weight gain. So what? There is no indication that this is a bad thing.

It's not an issue of HFCS, it's an issue of HFCS (or any sugar) being put into all sorts of food where it shouldn't be. Like bread and grilled chicken.

The problem is, people do know that their "grilled chicken stripes [are] stuffed with sugar". McDonalds is unhealthy. Do not buy processed foods. Buy simple, fresh, unprocessed foods. A whole chicken, rice, and fresh broccoli can feed a family of up to 8-9 for under $20. There are very easy ways to eat healthy for cheap without ever having to resort to sketchy Tyson pre-packaged chicken, or suspicious Wonder Bread.

There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. If it isn't, then that's fine, but don't go blaming other people for your misallocation of personal resources.

> There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it.

For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.

It is a myth that fast food is cheap. Fast food is more expensive than other foods on a by-weight basis.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda...

People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.

It most certainly is not a myth. In order to purchase and prepare your own food you need a kitchen and some basic things but most of all, and what I'm guessing is being overlooked by the dismissers above me: You need time.

Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it?

The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.

Also, you need training and you need kitchen implements.

Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do.

And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either.

I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.

So much rubbish. Cavemen could cook. People with modern amenities can cook faster than it takes to drive to McDonald's every day. People get fast food because of the taste and because they're too lazy to add rice to water/put a chicken in the oven/wrap a potato in foil/etc/etc/etc.

You've never spent time with people who were really poor, have you? A lot of people live in situations where their simplest appliances (like ovens) don't work. Or they cannot afford a real (rental) home at all, and live out of extended stay motels.

A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know.

There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue.

And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".

You've never spent time with people who were really poor

I've been really poor. On non-consecutive occasions.

Many of these kids do not watch TV

No offense, but you're just making shit up. You'd have to go to the most rural area of Mongolia before you find kids without ready access to television. That said, I'm not blaming children for anything--rather, most adults understand that a 99 cent can of pork and beans (available at any convenience mart) is healthier than fast food...and willingly ignore that fact.

No offense, but I have friends who teach in inner city schools and who mentor teens in places as diverse as Washington DC and Portland, OR. We talk about the plight of these kids all the time, and all the "obvious" stuff they don't know, and what's worse, how they don't realize their existences are abnormal because they have little exposure to what normal is. (Not: "Normal" is not a judgment. But if you don't know what options are, you can never be said to be able to choose.)

One of the avenues of "normalizing" is TV. Recently I've been talking with a friend who mentors a teenaged boy who just got himself hooked on meth. I couldn't understand how that could even happen, because "everybody knows that meth is the worst of the worst." My friend explained that he did not realize it's not normal for the aunt who's on meth to be the "stable" one in their family (dad is such a drunk he never eats or buys food… Auntie Meth feeds the boy, somehow). Unfortunately, that poor kid is now fucked.

I also used to live in a part of Baltimore City in the midst of gentrification and shared my block with people who'd lived in the same house for generations and people on welfare. Two of my neighbors on welfare didn't have a TV at all, or radio. Two, from a tiny block of 10 houses. Those happened to be 100% of my neighbors on welfare.

(How did they entertain themselves all day? Well, they didn't. For whatever reason, they had zero curiosity and zero boredom. They did basically nothing. This is not a criticism. They were nice to me, I was nice to them, and given my interactions with their kids, their kids seem to have a better life ahead of them. But the parents were terminally incurious, to the point of not knowing street names just a couple blocks away… because they never went anywhere, not on foot or any other way. It's a given that they could not read, but you don't have to read to pick up a couple street names over 15+ years living in the same place. But I'm not sure that would have made a difference.)

"And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves"."

Or salmonella, e coli, lysteria, botulinus, cholera, etc, etc...

I think you are really overstating this. We're meant to believe that going shopping, bringing the food home, preparing it (just rice alone takes a good half an hour, and chicken takes twice as long) and serving it takes less time than going to the McDonald's drive-thru?

That is very much not my experience.

I actually like to cook. It's fun and the food is perfectly suited to my tastes. But when I'm pressed for time, I'll still just stop by a fast-food restaurant because it's faster. And I have better access to fresh food and good cooking implements than many poor people, so cooking is even more of a decision for them.

Buying a large bag of rice and large bag of beans once every two weeks isn't a big problem. Those dry foods have a huge shelf life and are cheap. I didn't say they need to eat fresh baby spinach and kale every day.

First of all, even those articles are untrue unless your time is valued at zero.

Secondly, there are just as many - if not more - studies that show that junk food is, in fact, cheaper. Because weight is an obvious, but subtly wrong, measurement to compare by:

"Healthy eating really does cost more. That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation…"

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

Yeh, meat and vegetables can be expensive. But, for example, a bag of lentils, a bag of brown rice, some tinned tomatoes and spices. That stuff is so cheap, none of it requires refrigeration and it's easy to cook large amounts using a single pot on a plug-in stovetop. Sure, there's a process around it, but almost by definition, if you're poor, then you've got a low hourly rate. Even these days, as a "proper grown up", if someone suggests getting food out, my instinctive reaction is "No, I can't afford that". I think the problem more lies with the sort of idea that was in a front page article a couple of days back (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307) the bad stuff is just so tasty - what can make different kinds of people choose to eat super boring lentils and rice over super stimulating delicious fat/salt/sugar?

That still doesn't address the issue that none of those ingredients look like "food" to someone who doesn't already know you can put them all together with some heat, water, and time. Part of what keeps those foods cheap, as well, is that they aren't marketed, they have dull packaging, and they're on the lowest-value shelves in the supermarket where they're practically invisible.

Yeh, so true. It's a good hint you're shopping right if you have to bend down a lot and, hey, free workout. Also I know a huge number of people who well know how to cook, but just don't get round to it. Something, something delayed gratification, future time orientation, blah. Also, why am I reading hacker news and looking at knowyourmeme when I could be cooking dahl and rice?

Note that the article is considering fruits and vegetables, while I would argue that they should be considering staples such as potatoes, beans, and rice. Staples which are cheap, feed a significant portion of the world, and are easy to prepare by cooking in water.

Does anyone have statistics about this? I find it hard to believe that buying good food[0] and cooking it yourself is more expensive that eating at McDonald's. I suspect that taste and convenience have something to do with these choices rather than simply money.

[0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.

I cook on a regular basis, and have for years. Try as I may, there's no way I can match the cost of McDonald's for dinner every night, calorie for calorie. The closest I can come is by buying heavily processed foods.

There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.

In fairness, what you do is buy the raw ingredients to make 5 ro 10 times the amount of beef stew you want and either freeze the rest or eat stew for 2 or 3 days in a row. That sounds dull if you're single and like variety in your diet, but if you have a family it's quite practical.

Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most.

That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.

I do what exactly what you're talking about, and there's still no way I can match the prices of a canned stew with stuff I buy in a grocery store. It's not like the cost of beef goes down per pound when I buy it from the grocery store -- I pay a fixed cost, regardless of my quantity.

And this isn't surprising: $5 is remarkably cheap for a beef-based product. They do it by using remnant beef, which you can't really get in stores. Grocery store stew meat is probably 2-3x more expensive than the stuff they're using. Mine will taste better and be higher quality, but it won't be cheaper.

It's not like the cost of beef goes down per pound when I buy it from the grocery store -- I pay a fixed cost, regardless of my quantity.

I can't understand how you come to this conclusion. I definitely save money by buying larger cuts or bulk packs. Maybe you should come over for dinner :-)

I'm not saying that you can't save at all -- you can save 10% or so if you buy certain kinds of meat, in bulk. But it still doesn't make you cost-competitive with Hormel.

it surprised me when I realized most people don't do this.that's what my parents to growing up in that's what my wife and I do now. I only recently realized that most people don't put so much planning into their menus.

Why not Google for research instead of speculating? It took me 5 seconds to find this:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

"Healthy eating really does cost more.

That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups."

Comparing calorie to calorie almost seems silly. The definition of a junk food is something that has a high concentration of calories, particularly relative to its overall nutritional content.

How else will you compare a 2300 calorie diet of healthy foods with a 2300 calorie diet of unhealthy foods?

You can have a McDouble burger for $1 on the Dollar Menu. It contains 390 kcal and you need ~2300 kcal/day or about 6 burgers or $6. Can you go below that by cooking yourself? Unless you buy food in huge quantities, only eat pasta, or reduce your intake of meat, I think it's pretty hard.

Part of GP's point is that that's a myth. GP asserts that $20 of whole chicken, rice, and broccoli is good for 8-9 meals. You'd have a hard time getting 8-9 meals for $20 at McDonalds. It can be done, but most don't.

I cook, and I'm extremely skeptical of the GP's claim.

A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else.

Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.

I think it's legit, and I live in an urban area. But it does take extra time and skill.

There's no way that claim was legit. Not even close.

You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.

I do that all the time. They have a whole chicken at $0.99/lb at my local supermarket fairly regularly (every 2-3 weeks), so I usually buy one. I'll typically pan-roast it and get 2 meals (for 2 people, making 4) from that. Then I'll take the rest of the meat (that doesn't carve as nicely) and make a curry or some other stew. 8 meals from $20 doesn't sound like a stretch at all, and I'm not talking about tiny nouvelle cuisine portions either - I have a hearty appetite.

But you NO how to comparison shop. And you have access to a supermarket that has what you want. And you have the time to cook. And you have the time to save. And you have pots and pans. And you have adequate food storage containers. And you have...the list goes on.

It's incredible how easily we overlook everything it takes to do what you said.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who recently had a baby. He's an educated, employed, white, probably wealthy, smart, guy who loves good food and knows how to cook and lives in wealthy suburbs. What he said yesterday was along the lines of "I totally understand why people eat fast food so much. I drive by Jack in the box on the way home and, while I haven't done it yet, the idea is compelling."

So here's a guy who "knows" that it's bad to eat fast food. and doesn't want too. But he's tired from his 9-5 desk job, doesn't sleep as well as he wants to do to the newborn), and doesn't want to cook at the end of the day.

What if he was a high school graduate with a physical job making $35k a year with 2 kids who doesn't live near a grocery store and never had any exposure to cooking, food saving, and all the other things you have? What is the chance that person, on their own, is going to discover their horrible diet, learn how to prepare and save their food, break the habit of sugary foods, etc.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean it's easy, or common sense, or even possible for a huge swath of the population.

Empathy. That's all it takes to understand how easily people get stuck, because they're not superhuman. Yes, yes, personal responsibility etc. etc. but there's no point in denying that environment (and ecosystem -- viz a viz propping up incredibly unhealthy foods) plays a huge role.

Thanks for having empathy. Hopefully comments like yours will help other people see what they're lacking.

You're not quoting realistic prices for my part of the country, because $1/pound is about half what I pay for a whole bird, on average. Even at Safeway, I would pay around $1.80/pound for a factory farmed chicken.

So basically, the numbers only work out if you're living somewhere cheap (i.e. not urban). Where I live, a chicken that feeds four costs $8-$15 (roughly $2 a pound). Eight meals means two birds, plus the cost of everything else.

If you believe that McDonalds is the only one stuffing natural-looking food with HFCS, you are mistaken. And while educated people expect fast food burgers to be bad for you, the salads look like a smarter, reasonable choice (even though they often have more calories than the burger, even though the chicken is injected… not all places require calorie counts on the menu.) You will also find that many sit-down restaurants give the same preparation to their meat.

Time and time again has shown that every health (or financial…) crisis starts with moralizing. Which never works. Only when reform and legislation occur do things get better. But it's an appealing strategy because it feels good to the moralizer, and doesn't take any work.

The food industry knows what it's doing, does it on purpose [1], with government dollars. Government subsidies to individuals go to processed foods (because natural ingredients are more expensive), then those government dollars also end up in the pockets of corporations using government money to undercut prices thanks to industry corn subsidies.

Even if everyone were suddenly to start cooking all their meals and never eating out or buying any premade ingredients, that raw chicken at your local grocery store is also a lot less benign that you think. Most whole chickens are injected with all kinds of things.[2] At Whole Foods in NYC, I once bought a (very small) organic chicken that cost $16.

Of course, cooking home meals requires A) living in a place where you can cook, B) growing up understanding cooking is an option, C) understanding that food can even be dangerous, D) not living in one of America's many, very large food deserts [3]. And that's assuming you're not relying on government assistance to feed your baby… or should we say, feed your baby corn syrup? [4] And let's not forget school breakfasts and lunches for poor kids.[5]

Oh sure, in a perfect world, everybody has perfect information and the ability to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about their food. Not to mention access to grocery stores with healthy food. But in THIS world, you've got an ouroboros of government money funding and institutionalizing a crisis: from government subsidies to produce HFCS lowering the cost of very unhealthy and addictive foods, to government money paying for baby formula laced with HFCS made by the companies that benefit from the government subsidies for growing corn (a delicious double dip). Government cheese is even more addictive than HFCS. Hence, legislation.

[1] Certainly not the canonical reporting on the problem, but this NYT article about the intentional design of addictive food just came out yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicke...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

[4] http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies

[5] http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-p...

EDIT: One last thing. Not only is HFCS/CS a major ingredient in such seemingly trustworthy, reputable foods such as Mott's Apple Sauce, and probiotic yogurt, it's also found in pet food. Yes, pet food. I recently adopted a cat with an autoimmune problem and I ended up researching pet health issues. Pet diabetes is increasing terribly.[6] Cats have other health problems caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to get pet food, no matter how expensive, without biologically unnecessary sugars and starches -- which cats, pure carnivores, not only don't need, but suffer from. Dogs don't need corn syrup, either.

[6] http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report...

It should be mentioned that the govt. subsidies are present to protect US corn farmers rather than prop up food corporations.

Perhaps, but the intention doesn't change the result. Who is left unprotected? The taxpayer, who's funding all this.

The problem is, people do know [...]

No they don't. You know that and I know that, but we're reasonably well-educated, with a general grasp of economics nutrition and so forth. There are a lot of people - I'd guess up to half the country - that don't understand that stuff and have difficulty understanding the 'nutrition facts' labels on food. I do think people ought to be more responsible for their own diets, but consider the impact of poor diet upon brain development. If you grew up being fed low quality food, you're less likely to appreciate how bad for you it actually is.

McDonalds chicken strips and nuggets have 0 grams of Sugar. There's sugar in the buns, but it's not in the chicken.

http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...

I wasn't talking about their nuggets — although, there are a few facts you ought to know: One, the FDA allows you to report nutritional categories at 0g if there is .9g or less per serving. A lot of "low carb" foods push this ruling to its limits.

Second, I wasn't able to find the page for nuggets specifically, but I doubt their preparation of the chicken meat in nuggets is better than their non-breaded, grilled breast filets:

Grilled Chicken Fillet Allergens: SOY LECITHIN Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning (rice starch, salt, sugar, yeast extract, canola oil, onion powder, maltodextrin, chicken skin, paprika, flavor, sunflower oil, chicken, garlic powder, chicken fat, spices), sodium phosphates.

Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil and hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, mono-and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color).

CONTAINS: SOY LECITHIN.

SOURCE: http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item...

Maltodextrin isn't HFCS but it is a (no doubt corn-)derived sugar. And I highly doubt even most reasonable people would look at a plain grilled chicken patty and assume it has 18 ingredients, including TWO types of sugar (and possibly three — "flavor" is enigmatically opaque).

Looks like it contains vast amounts (~30% of the calories in an alleged meat product) of potato starch. How does that work metabolically? If it turns into fructose in the body, we're right back where we started with the sugars...

Starch is a whole bunch of glucose molecules chained together. No fructose.

You make a very good point: between tariffs, subsidies, FDA and UDSA regulations, etc., the government has effectively shaped the US food industry into what it is today. However, that doesn't mean it would be a good idea to ban HFCS. But I agree we should stop subsidizing it.

> Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

Nothing in your post appears to justify a ban on HFCS. Are "it gets used in foods you wouldn't expect" and "other countries ban it" justification enough? I'm not trying to defend HFCS, but if you're going to call for something to be banned, you need to provide better reasoning.

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