Most Common Source of Calories in U.S. is LOADED With Mercury!





Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, according to a new study. Mercury was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient.

HFCS has replaced sugar as the sweetener in many beverages and foods. A high consumer can take in about 20 teaspoons of HFCS per day. The chemical was found most commonly in HFCS-containing dairy products, dressings and condiments.

The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common.


Sources:

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy January 26, 2009

Washington Post January 26, 2009

Environmental Health January 2009, 8:2





Dr. Mercola's Comments:


In case you weren’t aware, the number one source of calories in the United States is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The average American consumes about 12 teaspoons of it every day, though as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) pointed out, teens and other “high consumers” may consume 80 percent more than that.

Now it turns out that this widespread sweetener is contaminated with the toxic heavy metal mercury!

The samples were found to contain levels of mercury ranging from below a detection limit of 0.005 to 0.570 micrograms mercury per gram of HFCS. And this was from samples of popular name-brand foods and beverages, including some made by Quaker, Hershey’s, Kraft and Smucker’s.

How Does Mercury Get Into Corn Syrup?

Although the makers of HFCS like to claim that it’s natural, it’s actually a highly refined product that would never exist in nature. Its manufacture involves an extensive process, one step of which is to separate corn starch from the corn kernel.

Caustic soda is used, among other things, to do this, and for decades mercury-grade caustic soda produced in industrial chlorine (chlor-alkali) plants has been used for this purpose.

Because mercury cells are used to produce some caustic soda, the caustic soda may become contaminated, and ultimately transfer that mercury contamination to the HFCS in your soda, salad dressing, soup, cereal, and so on.

Said IATP’s David Wallinga, M.D., a co-author of both studies:


“Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered. We are calling for immediate changes by industry and the FDA to help stop this avoidable mercury contamination of the food supply.”


Isn’t it ironic that the Corn Refiners Association just recently spent around $30 million on an ad campaign designed to rehabilitate HFCS’s reputation as an unhealthy sweetener?

It’s going to take a lot more than a few TV commercials to explain away this latest revelation.

Why Consuming Mercury is a Bad Idea

Mercury acts as a poison to your brain and nervous system. This is especially dangerous for pregnant women and small children, whose brains are still developing. If infants or fetuses are exposed to mercury, it can cause:


• Mental retardation
• Cerebral palsy
• Deafness
• Blindness


Even in low doses mercury can interfere with a child’s development, leading to shortened attention span and learning disabilities.

In adults, mercury poisoning can be a serious risk as well, and has been linked to fertility problems, memory and vision loss, and trouble with blood pressure regulation. It can also cause extreme fatigue and neuro-muscular dysfunction, as experienced recently by Chicago actor Jeremy Piven.

Further, studies show that mercury in your central nervous system (CNS) causes psychological, neurological, and immunological problems including:


• Arrhythmias and cardiomyopathies
• Tremors
• Insomnia
• Personality changes and irritability
• Headaches

• Weakness
• Blurred vision
• Slowed mental response
• Unsteady gait


To make matters worse, mercury bonds very firmly to structures in your CNS. Unless actively removed, it has an extremely long half-life of somewhere between 15 and 30 years in the CNS! What this means is that consuming mercury-contaminated HFCS is probably cumulative, with the damage adding up over time.

Mercury is Not the Only Reason to Avoid HFCS

The fact that HFCS-sweetened food and drinks may contain mercury is enough to make me avoid them like the plague. But then again, I avoided them entirely even BEFORE this news came out and I strongly encourage you to take a similar stance.

Part of what makes HFCS such an unhealthy product is that it is metabolized to fat in your body far more rapidly than any other sugar, and, because most fructose is consumed in liquid form (soda), its negative metabolic effects are significantly magnified.

Among them are:


• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Metabolic Syndrome
• An increase in triglycerides and LDL (bad) cholesterol levels
• Liver disease


Fructose also contains no enzymes, vitamins or minerals, and it leeches micronutrients from your body. Unbound fructose, which is found in large quantities in HFCS, can interfere with your heart's use of minerals such as magnesium, copper and chromium.

Last but not least, HFCS is almost always made from genetically modified corn, which is fraught with its own well documented side effects and health concerns, such as increasing your risk of developing a food allergy to corn.

Want to Ditch HFCS?

If you’re healthy, occasional use of small amounts of corn syrup isn’t going to cause any health catastrophes. However, most people are not eating corn syrup in moderation. In 2007, Americans consumed an average of 56 pounds of HFCS each!

A large part of this was undoubtedly from soda, which, again, is the number one source of calories in the United States. So if you’re looking to cut back on HFCS, right off the bat one of the best things to do is to limit or eliminate soda and sugary drinks from your diet, and my turbo tapping technique can help you to do that.

This dangerous sweetener is also in many processed foods and fruit juices, so to avoid it completely you need to focus your diet on whole foods. If you do purchase any processed foods, make sure you read the label … and put it back on the shelf if it lists high-fructose corn syrup as an ingredient -- especially if it’s the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient.





Related Links:


How High Fructose Corn Syrup Damages Your Body

Guess Who Funds High Fructose Corn Syrup Studies?

Debate About Dangers of High-Fructose Corn Syrup
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/02/14/Most-Common-Source-of-Calories-in-US-is-LOADED-With-Mercury.aspx

Another great example of how the FDA is supposedly protecting us. When are people going to wake up and figure out that they want us to be sick? Because then we need more drugs, which is the FDA's real purpose.

Yes, I've seen the commercials and was kind of wondering how in the world anyone would buy them. Kind of reminded me of the movie "Thanks For Smoking".

Have Americans really been this "dumbed down" already? Just look at the sales of soda.

FDA was never designed to protect anybody. This was supposed to raise the barriers to entry for businesses that bribe FDA, that is all.

It still does that just fine, looks like.

If I want a protection, I should recall an oldie but goodie: "If you want something done right, do it yourself."

EXACTLY!!

Supposedly their durg administration outlaws most noninvasive low risk medical treatments so people can use drugs with side affects instead. These side affects, of course, are treated with other drugs, etc.

This is why i am against big government. Also why it completely baffles me that people who preach about the problems we have seem to think the government needs to get bigger and take more control.

The government did not invent high-fructose corn syrup it was big business and big business ownes the government. The only check against big business is government, unfortunalty our government has been corrupted. Lets hope Obama can make some changes.

so that's what's wrong with me????

Pig Intestines, Downer Cows
By Terry J. Allen
Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine Corruption and incompetence in federal bureaucracies are enough to make your blood run thin.

In February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) admitted that it had allowed into the country tainted, reportedly untested heparin. Distributed by Illinois-based Baxter International, the blood thinner was injected into thousands of vulnerable patients and was linked to adverse effects in more than 800 people, as well as 19 deaths. Given the flawed reporting system, the actual toll is unknowable. But it was preventable.

Baxter imported much of the 35 million vials of heparin it sold last year in the United States from Changzhou SPL. The Chinese company included crude heparin squeezed from the intestines of slaughtered pigs processed in filthy kitchen factories that would make a backwoods meth lab look like an Intel clean room.

The FDA never inspected SPL or most of the 3,249 firms on its list of approved importers, and never tracked the supply chain.

Funding for inspections is down nearly 30 percent under President Bush, according to Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), chair of the appropriations panel responsible for FDA funding. At the current rate, the FDA would need more than 13 years to cover all the approved foreign firms. Meanwhile the administration panders to Big Pharma by banning the importation of high-quality, low-priced drugs manufactured in Canada.

Clearly, the current FDA head, Andrew von Eschenbach—an old friend of Bush—is doing a heck of a job.

Federal agencies—such as the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—are hobbled by ineptitude and in thrall to political and corporate interests.

FEMA, the poster child for criminal negligence, has sat for two years on hard evidence that trailers warehousing Hurricane Katrina victims were exposing residents to dangerous levels of formaldehyde, linked to cancer and lung disease.

In early 2006, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) excoriated FEMA’s leadership for failure “to understand and address the public health implications” of exposure to the toxin. A year later, the agency that brought us duct tape to counter terrorist attacks took action: It advised trailer residents simply to air out their homes. (David Paulison, author of the duct tape strategy, now heads FEMA.)

As of Feb. 1, approximately 38,297 Katrina households were still living in toxic trailers. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study pushed FEMA to acknowledge the danger and warn residents.

Part of the problem with the federal bureaucracies is that their areas of authority can overlap, conflict or leave gaps. While no agency has authority over formaldehyde levels in private homes, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration limits exposure to 0.75 parts per million (ppm) for an eight-hour day. Katrina victims breathed up to .59 ppm for years at a time, according to the CDC, and levels were likely far higher when the trailers were new and the weather was warm.

As for the USDA, the department is slower on its feet than the downer cows dragged through its meat inspections system. An animal rights group—not USDA investigators—documented the gruesome sight of dying and diseased cows, riding forklifts to slaughter. The news prompted the February recall of 143 million pounds of beef from Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. By the time the USDA acted, much of the beef had already been served in school lunches.

In a separate incident in 2007, almost 12 weeks passed between the first illness linked to E. coli contamination and the USDA’s recall of 21.7 million pounds of Topps Meat hamburger.

Conflicts of interest, cronyism, poor leadership and dispirited staffs have compromised our federal bureaucracies. Underfunding is also a problem, but “funds alone cannot fix an agency that routinely fails at its most basic responsibilities,” said DeLauro at a February congressional hearing.

The system intended to protect the public is more tainted than backroom heparin, more toxic than FEMA trailers and more suspect than downer cows.

When Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), head of the subcommittee that oversees the FDA, requested a briefing on heparin, the FDA said it was too busy. “Maybe it’s time that we replace the leadership at the FDA,” Stupak said.

Maybe that’s not enough. Maybe Congress should exercise oversight and the new president should invest the political and financial capital necessary to revamp the structure, priorities and loyalties of the country’s failed bureaucracies.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3566/

You are mistaken. Very few checks are needed for big business by the government. Especially since most BIG businesses have members in congress and/or seats in the very organizations meant to control them.

Historically putting government in charge of regulation always ends up in an oligarchy. Look at Rome.

Government regulation caused most of our mess. Only because it limits competition for established big businesses. Think about it...

back off of my corn syrup...some of us need it to blame life on

I thought about it and your right big business owns the politicians we both agree on that. We need campaign finance reform to help cure the government.

I'm gonna drink corn syrup on my mountain and kick stones at the people in the muckity muck

im going to look up your dress and get my rocks off

pfft what dress???? that corn syrup makes me wear overalls

I recomend you avoid corn syrup. Heck I recomend planting a garden and avoiding as much food as you can that is store bought.

don't hate because you aren't as high up the mountain

I like it down here in the valley by the river, its comfortable.

i hear the stuff puts hair on your chest

i'm going to spend a fortune on disposable razors

I posted on this some time ago too.

It's really silly that so many products contain HFCS.

Look into it folks

I'm sick to death of frakking A-Rod, baseball, and steroids!

If only they would pay 1/10th the attention to issues like this.

Maybe we should all start eating the hides off baseballs and footballs and munching turf since it is so well regulated.

Take all these chemists testing basball players pee and give them REAL jobs, like testing EVERYTHING from China!

Take all the frakking baseball players and put them on the border. Maybe they can throw rocks since they don't let us shoot back.

No, however, the Government did create the Sugar caps which restrains the amount of sugar that can be grown or imported, which artificially inflated the prices, meanwhile they give the corn industry a subsidy, which drives the price of corn and it's by products down. Mercury in HFCS... riddle me this, Batman: What part of the process of turning Corn in HFCS involves Mercury?