There's something in the water

The 1950s were a great time for conspiracy theories. Communists had infiltrated the Senate, aliens were watching us from space, and a mysterious chemical was being added to our drinking water.

The first two theories were false. The third has given three generations of Americans their famously healthy teeth.

The chemical was fluoride, but to skeptics who felt it was a plan to control the population, it might as well have been DDT. Given all the other advances in science, the story didn't seem too implausible either.

"There's something in the water" remains a fixed expression today, describing a situation no one can explain. Why do people in a certain place vote the way they do? There must be something in the water. Why are so many Americans overweight? There's...

Wait. There is something in the water — in the soft drinks most Americans drink every day. It's high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a mixture of (typically) 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose, made from cornstarch. Each year, the average American consumes 17 kilograms — 48,000 calories — of this substance (along with a similar amount of sugar) without thinking about it.

The US soft-drink industry began using HFCS in 1984, after import tariffs had raised the price of sugar. Funnily enough, that's exactly when Americans really began to gain weight. We went from a few people being stout or stocky (overweight) to lots of people being perfectly round (obese). Something happened. Look at the sharp bend in this graph:

Scientists only started searching for the causes about five years ago and haven't been able to prove anything yet — but high-fructose corn syrup has been the biggest change to the American diet in the past three decades.

The food industry says that HFCS is nutritionally the same as sucrose, or table sugar, which is a compound of 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose. Critics, however, say that the higher fructose content of corn syrup throws the body off balance, making it take longer to realize the stomach is full. It's known that large amounts of fructose on its own can interfere with the body's sensitivity to insulin.

The industry is now trying to get the government to change the name "high-fructose corn syrup" to something less artificial-sounding, like "corn sugar", while food campaigners are trying to get corn syrup removed altogether and replaced by regular sugar again.

Both efforts seem to forget that consumption of both sugar and corn syrup has skyrocketed. In 1977, a typical American consumed 50 calories a day from soft drinks. In 2001, it was 144 calories. The average drink size increased during that time from 400 to 620 ml.

Both HFCS and regular sugar are now present in processed solid food as well, in amounts far greater than in 1977. The difference is hundreds of calories a day.

Morgan Spurlock's 2004 movie Supersize Me raised some awareness of this, and by 2009, the daily calories from soft drinks had fallen slightly, to 129 per person. (Some) consumers are also learning not to buy "foods" that have corn syrup or sugar listed among the first three ingredients.

This is late, but welcome news, and news we should be thinking about now because Sunday, November 14 is World Diabetes Day. Ten percent of adult Americans have this disease, as do 23 percent of those over the age of 60. It is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.

The hysterical Americans of the 1950s could not have imagined this — not in their wildest dreams. There really is something in the water.