Tariffs Make You Fat
Tariffs Make (or at least help make) You Fat
A Coke in the United States does not taste like a Coke does in other countries. Why not you ask? Well it’s rather simple: the United States has an enormous tariff on imported sugar so Coke, in the United States at least, uses other sugar substitutes. According to a great article by Kate Hopkins, the scheme works as follows:
1. First, USDA’s [U.S. Department of Agriculture's] Commodity Credit Corporation lends money each year to sugar cane processors at a specific rate per pound of sugar. The loans must be repaid, with interest, after nine months.
2. The processors use the money to operate their factories and to pay sugar growers for the cane or beets that they deliver to the mills. Should the price of raw sugar fall below the amount set by the government at the time of the loan, the sugar processing companies are allowed to forfeit their sugar in lieu of repaying the loan.
3. The law requires that this program operate at no net cost to the federal government. The government must then manipulate the market to keep sugar prices higher than the price at which the sugar companies would forfeit their product. Otherwise the government would be out of the money lent and still have the sugar to distribute, further adding to the governments net cost.
4. To manipulate the market, each year the USDA estimates how much sugar Americans will consume in the following year and how much sugar U.S. growers will send to market to meet consumers demand.
5. The USDA then establishes a quota for imports of sugar from foreign producers, such as the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the Philippines, and Australia. This quota allows just enough sugar in to meet demand, but not so much as to affect the already high prices.
This is a fairly obviously form of corporate welfare and it costs consumers dearly. Hopkins estimates that a five pound bag of sugar that would cost a dollar costs $2.25 under this scheme. And the sugar manufacturers have paid good money to ensure this, the Fanjul family being the best example. Writes Laurie Bennett:
The four Fanjul brothers have rebuilt their [sugar] dynasty in the U.S. through aggressive acquisitions and government help. The family has worked hard to maintain good relations with the party in power. Florida Crystal’s parent company, Flo-Sun Inc., has already spent $355,000 this year on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Last year’s lobby costs totalled $715,000.
OK, so we’re getting ripped off, but why does this form of corporatism make people fat? Again, it’s not too complicated actually. One of the major substitutes companies use instead of sugar (for things like Coca-Cola) is high fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup, unfortunately, is much more fattening than sugar. Princeton professor Bart Hoebel found that “high fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain [than other sweetners].” And doctor Gabe Mirken points out:
Several studies show that drinking large amounts of soft drinks is associated with increased risk for obesity and that the extra gain in weight is not due just to the calories in the beverages. Evidently something in soft drinks makes people eat more food than they would otherwise. High fructose corn syrup may be that factor.
High fructose corn syrup is the leading sweetener in the United States today, with 4.5 billion dollars worth sold each year. High-fructose corn syrup first appeared in the American market in 1966, and now the average American takes in 62.6 pounds per year.
Several studies have shown that fructose is processed differently in the body than the far more common sugar, glucose. Glucose causes the pancreas to release insulin which drives sugar from the bloodstream into cells. Glucose causes fat cells to release leptin that makes you feel full so you eat less. Glucose prevents the stomach from releasing ghrelin that makes you hungry. On the other hand, fructose does not cause fat cells to release leptin and does not suppress ghrelin. This means that fructose increases hunger to make you eat more. Furthermore, the liver converts fructose far more readily to a body fat called triglyceride, than it does with glucose. High triglyceride levels raise blood levels of the bad LDL cholesterol and lower blood levels of the good HDL cholesterol, which increases heart attack risk.
So the government sponsors all sorts of anti-obesity programs—with little success—when the best thing they could do to fight obesity is to simply lift the tariff on sugar. Again, the government fails to solve a problem it helped create.
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But the Corn Refiners Association says it’s perfectly safe!
See this ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyj2N-AspqU
Why would they lie to us? I mean, more people are turning their backs on HFCS, so they’re just trying to save their market share!
“Several studies have shown that fructose is processed differently in the body than the far more common sugar, glucose”
Common (table) sugar is sucrose. Sucrose breaks down in the stomach into 50% glucose and 50% fructose.
HFCS in soft drinks is 55% fructose and 45% glucose.
If fructose is bad for you, table sugar and HFCS are both bad for you.
Yes, those are the approximate breakdowns, but metabolism and health are complicated. As a Science20.com article puts it (http://www.science20.com/news_articles/highfructose_corn_syrup_worse_table_sugar_study):
“First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars — it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose — but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose.
“Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.
“This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.”
I probably should mention there is some controversy with this finding (although a significant amount of the positive research on HFCS seems to have been funded by the HFCS industry). For an overview, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Obesity
” Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized”
Yeah, that extra step takes how long?
If HFCS were shown to be more harmful than sucrose I’m sure the gov’t would just increase taxes on it (“health advocates” and sucrose producers are probably already arguing for higher taxes).
Full of salient points. Don’t stop bleeiinvg or writing!