Corn refiners ‘buy’ Cornell to sell more HFCS

We know how much it costs to send a kid to an Ivy League university like Cornell — a lot.

But how much does it cost to buy Cornell?

That’s something you might want to ask the Corn Refiners Association. That’s the group whose job it is to push high fructose corn syrup down our throats.

So with sales of HFCS sinking every day, the association set out to give us a sales pitch for HFCS in a very sneaky way.

It funded a “study” by Cornell to tell us all how stupid and badly informed we are if we wish to avoid certain food ingredients.

It said we’re suffering from “food fears.”

Even before learning that Big Corn had financed it, this so-called “study” looked mighty odd from the very first paragraph.

The lead author, Brian Wansink, a “food psychologist” who runs a “”Food and Brand Lab” at Cornell, said that all these “misconceptions” come from websites and places like Facebook. That’s because, he claimed, all these food-fearing people need to find friends to share their fears with. It’s quite a challenge to “combat” all that “misinformation,” he added.

And as his exhibit A for one of those silly food fears, Wansink brings up HFCS.

Hmm, what a coincidence!

The “study” he and his team conducted consisted of a phone survey of 1008 moms who were asked what they thought about HFCS.

By asking them some ridiculous questions, he came to some even more ridiculous conclusions, as well as a way for us to “overcome” our fears.

Wansink said that we need to learn the whole truth and background about these ingredients that frighten us so we’ll all be “smarter” consumers. There’s nothing wrong with HFCS, he says, there’s something wrong with us.

Well, Dr. Wansink, here’s something for you to take back to your friends in Big Corn.

The more we learn about HFCS, the more we want to make sure we don’t consume even one drop of it.

And that’s definitely being a “smarter” consumer.

Sources:

“Increasing familiarity is the best way to avoid ingredient-based food fear” Brian Wansink, Aner Tal, and Adam Brumberg. (2014), foodpsychology.cornell.edu