Once again, the food industry is claiming that consumers are too stupid to understand what ingredients on a label mean. This time, The Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA; they are requesting permission to change the name from “High Fructose Corn Syrup”  to “corn sugar”.

Seriously? What do they think changing the name will do? We still know how bad HFCS is for us; our bodies still don’t metabolize the man-made sugars in the same way.

Apparently, the higher-ups in the food industry think that the name “high fructose corn syrup” is too confusing for us peasants to understand.

Audrae Erickson, president of The Corn Refiners Association, had this to say:

Clearly the name is confusing consumers. Research shows that ‘corn sugar’ better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose and the sweetness in this ingredient.

HFCS has become widely known by the general population as an unhealthy ingredient; research by the NPD shows that 58% of Americans are concerned about health risks posed by HFCS. This petition to the FDA seems more like an attempt at a coverup; many Americans would not realize that “corn sugar” is the same thing as HFCS. Therefore, until we got the news spread around about the dangers of this “new” ingredient, people would still be endangering their health and the health of their children.

The most logical solution to the fact that people are discovering how unhealthy HFCS is for our children would be to stop using it. This apparently reeks of too much common sense for the food industry people!

Ms. Erickson goes on to say that,

The name is confusing, and consumers don’t understand that [HFCS] has the same calories as sugar. They also think it’s sweeter tasting. That’s why the alternate name provides clarity for consumers when it comes to the ingredient composition and helps them better understand what’s in their foods.

My question is this: how are our brains, which this woman obviously thinks are puny, going to see the same ingredient differently simply because they change its name? IF The Corn Refiners Association is successful with getting the name of HFCS changed to “corn sugars”, it will be a vast injustice.

Information about our foods is not made readily available; they don’t publicize things like this on the evening news. Instead, we have to actively search for the information. Because of this, the general public will not be aware that “corn sugars” are just another name for the same killer ingredient: high fructose corn syrup.

Read More: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/a-new-name-for-high-fructose-corn-syrup/