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Comment by buddylw | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely that corn subsidies are out of control, but it's not clear that getting rid of corn would solve the health problem. It would likely be replaced with 'high fructose' <some other starch>. Fructose has properties (very sweet, doesn't crystallize like sucrose, etc.) that junk food purveyors love and corn doesn't even contain any fructose naturally.

Any starch + amylase makes a syrup (my personal favorite is rice syrup). An extra process turns part of the glucose to fructose making it very sweet.

Sorry to crap on a point I mostly agree with in the name of technical correctness :)

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Right, if corn were not subsidized, corn syrup would probably not be wholly replaced with cane sugar, as cane sugar is much more expensive, a lot of it is imported, and it can't really be grown productively in most of the US--inside the US it's really only grown in Florida, Texas, and Hawaii.

The 89 million acres[1] of corn harvested in the US would be partly replaced by some other starchy crop x, and high fructose corn syrup would be partly replaced by high fructose x syrup.

The root problem is really the fact that we as a nation eat too much food, and too much cheap, high-carbohydrate, calorie-dense, processed food. I agree with cutting corn subsidies, but the real solution is on the demand side.

1: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornac....

> we as a nation eat too much food

I really don't know how to fix it, because it is more the subconscious drive to overeat when you can than any cultural issue. Food is plentiful and cheap, so Americans devour it incessantly. One thing I think could fix it is decoupling the social aspects of eating - most families only see each other for food, which prompts them to eat more if subconsciously they want more human interaction.

It is also known you eat more when you aren't happy, so obviously make people happier, which isn't something as a society we are doing much of.

> Food is plentiful and cheap, so Americans devour it incessantly.

This isn't really the case.

The problem is that the processed food we are creating is so abnormal, our bodies simply don't know how to respond to it. The overwhelming amount of health issues that we are experiencing as a nation is a direct result of this.

Your body has pre-configured "stop" signals based on volume and how full your stomach is. The processed foods are so dense in sugars and calories, your body responds improperly, and as a result, people "over eat".

If we revert to eating things that we can actually identify the contents of, you'll find that we will very quickly stop over eating.

> Food is plentiful and cheap

> most families only see each other for food

This happens in most European countries as well, it's by no means an American thing.

All these arguments could apply just as well to Japan, which has an obesity rate far, far lower than the US.

Sugar is only expensive because of the extreme tariffs the government places on it.

Exactly. Which reinforces the opposite of the grandparent of this comment. As usually happens, the problem is that somebody is using guns to force other people to do things in a non-rational way.

From 2008-2011:

- Average price of raw sugar, world market: $492.8 per tonne

- Average price of HFCS-55, US market: $528.1 per tonne (HFCS-55 has equivalent sweetness to sucrose.)

Sugar vs. HFCS is a natural experiment. Americans are the experimental group, and the rest of the world is the control group. In non-OECD countries, HFCS has less than 1% market share. Why would you pay more money for an inferior product?

And remember -- the price of high-fructose corn syrup includes subsidies. In a free market, with no corn subsidies and no sugar tariffs, HFCS would be at an even greater price disadvantage.

Source: OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook, 2011-2020, p. 132. http://www.oecd.org/site/oecd-faoagriculturaloutlook/4818429...

Sugar vs. HFCS is a natural experiment. Americans are the experimental group, and the rest of the world is the control group. In non-OECD countries, HFCS has less than 1% market share.

Is there anything useful that can be derived from that experiment, though? The control group varies in significant ways, both amongst itself and w.r.t. Americans, and includes countries with both high and low levels of obesity. Has anyone attempted to back out any kind of useful estimate by treating this as a natural experiment and adjusting for confounds?

Examples: most sugar in both Germany and Mexico is from sugar rather than HFCS, but Germany is less obese than the US, while Mexico is more obese than the US. Mexico is poorer than either the US or Germany, so that could be the confound; but Germans walk and bike more than either the US or Mexico, so that could be a different confound. It's kind of a messy experiment.

I think the 'natural experiment' was in reference to the selection of HFCS over sugar for economics reasons. Not obesity.

You can't compare the US price of HFCS to the world price of raw sugar as it doesn't count the absurd US tariffs on it. When you count these in I'm pretty sure that HFCS is cheaper than sugar in the united states.

That's right, HFCS is slightly cheaper than raw sugar in the US because the government has extremely protective import quotas against world priced sugar. The invention of HFCS in the 1980s is a direct result of the U.S. sugar program. But if you allowed a free market for sugar in the U.S. the U.S. raw sugar price would equalize at the world sugar price, and it is likely that HFCS would disappear.

Also grown in Louisiana.

Corn is the US climate friendly equivalent of sugarcane. Sugar cane is the most harvested crop worldwide. Sugarcane has heavy import tariffs in the US as welfare for the domestic corn industry.

Brazil has a 22% Ethanol requirement on its gasoline and all that comes from sugar cane.

The previous three comments, from three different people, all seem to think that we're stuck with corn syrup because we can't grow enough sugarcane in the US.

But sugarcane is not the only way to produce sucrose!

Sugar beets currently account for 55% of sugar production in the United States. [1]

What's more, sugar beets will grow in relatively poor soil. Top four sugarbeet-producing states: Minnesota, Idaho, North Dakota, and Michigan [2].

Notice how these are not states renowned for the quality of their soil. Idaho grows a lot of potatoes not because they want to, but because the soil won't support a more valuable crop.

So, we're chewing up our best agricultural land and paying billions of dollars in subsidies to grow an inferior substitute to sucrose. Instead of growing the real thing on our marginal agricultural lands.

It's not even close.

Sources:

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-sweeteners/backgr...

[2] http://www.fas.usda.gov/info/factsheets/CAFTA/statesugarprod...

Where beets are grown in MN and ND is actually some of the best land in the country. Sugar beet subsidies are an even bigger boondoggle than corn. As the beet welfare queens retire or die off their land is generally bought out by a larger concern and switched over to another cash crop like GMO free soybeans for the Japanese market.

If you were being paid more money to grow beets on land that could support soybeans, why wouldn't you grow beets? It's economically rational to the farmer who's getting subsidies -- even though it's economically irrational for the world as a whole.

Subsidies distort the market, and produce completely illogical results. You can't get rid of just one subsidy, because that just gives an advantage to the next-most-subsidized item. But remove all the subsidies, and things will return to an economically-rational state of affairs.

> You can't get rid of just one subsidy, because that just gives an advantage to the next-most-subsidized item.

If the total amount of subsidy $ is reduced, it will be an improvement.

I would be all about increasing reliance on sugar beet crops if it wasn't for one thing. Sugar beets have one of the highest utilizations of genetically modified seeds. If we are going to use mire of it lets get Monsanto out of the picture.

The other thing is most people don't realize how many things HFCS is in. Ketchup, iced tea, most cereals, most "fruit" drinks.

By the way,.Brazil gasoline alcoholis are currently US corn alcohol.

US subsidies to corn and subsidies to.any ethanol.resulted that selling cane ethanol to US and buying corn ethanol turns a profit for fuel.companies. Yes, it is that bad, diesel.pollution with shipping and all.

The problem in Brazil is more structural and political than it has to do with US corn subsidies. Through Petobras, the government kept gasoline prices artificially low for a long time and that severely hampered the ethanol producer because here in Brasil the ethanol prices are tied to the gasoline ones (an important part of the ethanol demand is the flex fuel cars that can choose between both fuels and if ethanol is above 70% of the cost of gasoline then gasoline becomes more cost effective).

So basically the ethanol infrastructure got all messed up to the point were it couldn't even keep up with the domestic supply. If it were not for that then brazilian ethanol would actually be able to compete with some of the american ethanol because sugar cane gives higher yields and nowadays you can charge a premium for being more environmentally friendly.

Be careful! Raising the price of a cheap good can drive consumers to buy less of a more expensive competing good, and therefore buy yet MORE of the now-less-expensive cheap good.

If corn gets more expensive, and that may mean that people need to squeexe their food budgets and buy fewers expensive foods like vegetables, and instead by more corn sugar, which is still cheapest per-calorie.

>The root problem is really the fact that we as a nation eat too much food,

It appears that people used to eat more food in the past. At least for Finland, modern Finns eat 40% less calories than they used to 100 years ago. The reason is that agriculture work demands a lot of calories.

But were Finns eating too much food 100 years ago? Probably not, considering their daily caloric expenditure at the time.

"Too much food" is of course relative to how much food your body needs, given how physically active you are.

But, I suspect that Americans on average both get less exercise and consume more calories than they did 100 years ago.

I think the point is that getting rid of the subsidies would let the price of HFCS increase and would be less attractive to food producers.

Regarding the idea that sucrose is healthier than HFCS, I remain unconvinced.

See Robert H. Lustig's awesome expostion, Sugar: The Bitter Truth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

He explains the endocrinology behind why our bodies cannot stay ahead of our sugar intake.

Saying sugar is healthier than HFCS is sort of like saying morphine is healthier than heroin. It may technically be true, but both will kill you eventually. That said, I agree that if the cost of sugar and HFCS were higher, it would no longer be cost effective to put it in bread. I think everyone can agree that HFCS and sugar probably shouldn't be in bread.

When I make bread at home, I put sugar in it to help the yeast grow.

Point taken, but the wheat in bread is not much better for you than the pure sugar...

I'm not a biologist, related from Lustig's video, probably incorrectly:

fructose + glucose = sucrose. Body needs glucose. Fructose goes straight to liver, metabolized like alcohol, a bunch of bad stuff happens. Reason fruits are better than fruit juice is the fiber blocks the fructose from being metabolized, letting the needed glucose through.

Eating straight refined sugar is probably almost as bad as HFCS. But other sources of sugar (in moderation) are proably fine.

FWIW, I add fruit into my morning kale smoothie, and it tastes delicious.

> Reason fruits are better than fruit juice is the fiber blocks the fructose from being metabolized, letting the needed glucose through.

Can we get a source on this? I'm very curious, because I eat a ton of fruit with a lot of fructose every day and this Lustig video has gotten me worried.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth is movie length but well worth watching.

I wouldn't call saying "sure, we would save hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, but not much beyond that would change" to be shitting on the persons point that we should stop corn subsidies.

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