FYI-High Fructose Corn Syrup

>While I was in Italy, I went to several supermarkets. I read labels there. A few products like some cookies did have HFCS. So I think it's beginning to trickle in there.<

In the free marketplace, much of what trickles down to the consumer is profit- and availability- driven, naturally. NO ONE has the size of corn crop of the US and Canada, no one. Or wheat either, for that matter. We also own a sizeable share of the cane and beet sugar industry. So. Our food producers have access to unlimited amounts of both refined sugar and HFCS, at a really good price, so there ya go-- easy to find lots of commercial food products that contain white and whole wheat, as well as beet and cane sugars and HFCS.

In smaller countries in other parts of the world, all that stuff would have to be imported at great cost (both transportation costs and tariffs), so naturally there's not as much of it in their foods. In the US, we suffer not only from an overabundance of white flour and sweetners in commercial foods, but also an overabundance of different brands and types of foods-- nine kinds of chocolate wafer cookies, 32 kinds and flavors of ice cream, 16 kinds of wheat crackers, 75 kinds of breakfast cereal, etc. Our grocery stores are now as big as football arenas, with aisles and aisles and aisles of (largely) variations on a theme-- foods that were cheap to produce, readily available to buy, and 90% of it is bad for ya.

The other thing to remember is that a lot of the anti-HFCS "research" and commentary you find on the internet originated with the very powerful and wealthy cane sugar growers... it's REAL important to them for the food manufacturers and for consumers in general to choose cane sugar instead of HFCS, after all.