A Frightening Secret That the French Know About American Food

One lethal substance, four simple words: high fructose corn syrup. You see it on the ingredients of almost every food you purchase, be it savory or sweet. It’s hard to avoid at your average grocery store unless you stick to the organic aisle. The dangers of consuming this appear endless. It’s been linked to type-2 diabetes and America’s obesity epidemic.

OK, Americans are used to hearing this kind of stuff about sugar, etc. It’s easy to turn a blind eye. But it gets worse. The manufacturers of corn syrup put in lethal toxins. Like this stuff which kills living cells in order to sterilize water treatment systems. It’s called glutaraldehyde. Studies show that this toxin can burn a hole in your stomach. Something else you’ll be coming into contact with? Mercury. Do I even need to explain how bad that is?

It’s pretty scary that this is in almost all our food, let alone legal at all. But whatever. We should be focusing on supporting the corn industry, right, folks?

We don’t need corn syrup, and outside of the U.S, its consumption is very limited. Maybe because other countries aren’t so sheltered from the truth. Searching for honest information on corn syrup in American media can be pretty difficult with the corn industry’s influence. When I googled “Is corn syrup bad for you?” I came up with a frightening number of websites defending it. The most disturbing was www.sweetsuprise.com, which affiliates itself with the Corn Refiners Association. It claims that all the research on the dangers of corn syrup is phony on its page, “Myths v. Facts.”

But when I googled the same question (in French) with the settings on Google switched to French results, I came up with tons of images like the above as well as many disturbing articles.

These lab rats were fed high fructose corn syrup. Monsanto performed the same experiment except they cleverly stopped after about a year. “Look, it’s fine!” they could claim. French researchers continued the experiment, and in just two years, huge tumors began to grow, weighing up to a quarter of their weight. This diet also shortened the life spans of the males by twenty months, and the females by three months. That’s pretty bad for an animal with average life span of two to three years.

Well, Monsanto sure didn’t want the results of that little experiment to seep into American media, and as far as I can tell, it really hasn’t.

For comparison, the average American is estimated to consume about 132 calories of high fructose corn syrup daily. Yikes! In half a lifetime, we could end up like this.

 

Weenies Are For Meanies

 

One of the most popular everyday foods in France is sausage, or saucisse. A whole meal can consist of five different types of sausages, grilled to crispy blackness. There's a famous pork festival in the West of France I used to go to in which piles of sausage are displayed and sold cheaply by the link. I liked it because of the cute little t-shirts they sold featuring fat, friendly-faced pigs, but I never enjoyed the taste of the sausage. I hated the way juice would burst into my mouth when when my teeth would break the skin. The juice reminded me of blood and sweat.

I've read that when animals are slaughtered, they produce stress and fear hormones which are passed onto humans when we eat them, leading many meat-eaters to feel more depressed than vegetarians. I don't know what it is about sausage, maybe that juiciness, but for me, the taste always seemed particularly charged with death.

I'm probably getting way too into vegetarian-fundamentalist mode for most people, especially because most people are meat-eaters and don't really want to think about this kind of stuff. For that, I apologize. But still, sausage really does creep me out. Especially because I thought I was done with that kind of stuff, and then guess what my mom brings me home for dinner?

THIS:

Yeah. I was scared, too! That picture is life-size, so don't be alarmed by the fact that it pops out of the page. And it's supposed to be wheat gluten, but I think they went a little too far with their imitation of meat. I mean, I get that they use all the spices, and the texture, but look at that liquid in on the left side of the plastic. Is that blood? It looks like blood. I don't know why they had to recreate fake blood. That just seems ridiculous. People who want blood can go eat a real sausage.

Okay, it's probably just some sauce or something. But still. Vegetarians are sensitive to this kind of thing. I don't think they should put weird liquid in the plastic.