The problem with high fructose corn syrup is that it's so incredibly pervasive. If it were limited to people sprinkling it over something occasionally, I doubt it would be a problem at all. But it's in everything, even things that don't make sense, and the amount consumed on a daily basis will tick up FAST if you don't consciously avoid the stuff. (I feel much the same way about salt, soy, and basically any other "evil" foodstuff.)

Um, no, no shock at all here. I looked at EVERY processed food I have this morning (There's not that many, so it's not a huge job) and I found ONE item in the pantry that had HFCS. Two cans of stewed tomatoes. Oddly, a can of black beans from the same brand name (S&W) had sugar, but no HFCS.

I make any bread I eat, so nope, no HFCS there either. I don't eat bread that often.

I'll keep a closer eye on canned tomatoes from here on out, but if I can't find a brand without, I'm not gonna worry over it.

Frankly, I don't intend to panic over HFCS or anything else. MOST of what I eat daily does NOT have it, so an occasional can or serving of something that does just isn't going to freak me. It's like trans fats, those are all over the place in processed and restaurant foods too, including in some that say they have ZERO (because they have less than a half gram per serving), but mostly you can avoid them.

I think the ticket is moderation and eating fewer highly processed foods. I might add, there's no HFCS in the maple syrup I have in the pantry. No HFCS in my plain greek yogurt, no HFCS in my honey or agave nectar. No HFCS in my 100% rolled oats. No HFCS in my steel cut oats, or cheddar cheese, or raw nuts, or eggs or turkey or beef, or cod or shrimp. In my pantry & fridge, it's not pervasive at all, really!

Its nice that you have the time to make your bread. Its also wonderful that you have very little processed food. That just means that I am not directing the suggestion to read labels AT YOU. It means that I am suggesting it to those of us who:

1) Work 60 hour weeks and cannot stay home and bake bread.

2) Have income issues that preclude us from buying the 6$ steel cut oats versus the plain package oatmeal (less healthy, but Ok) that cost 4$. It might be 2$ for the same things if you live outside of NYC or L.A., but some of us don’t.

3) Who live in high rent/ cost areas (Hello fellow New Yorkers, San Franciscan's etc), where our rent is more than most people's mortgages and therefore the majority of our income goes to “living”. My rent is almost 1400 a month for a 1 bedroom, but I live in NYC and not Utah, which by comparison would probably be 700$ a month. My family is in NYC so, moving to Utah would divorce me from everyone I've ever known and loved. Also, if a NYC dweller saw my 1400 dollars for a one bedroom quote they would IMMEDIATELY KNOW I live in a poorer neighborhood. People in Manhattan pay about 2000- 3000 a month for a 1 bedroom, unless they have been living at the same address for over a decade. People here live in really crowded conditions to chip in for rent. Thats how expensive things are here. So in my neighborhood it's common to find a family of 4 or 5 living in a 1 bedroom and each adult pays 700 each, and the kids sleep in the living room, or 3 adults (a couple who live in the bedroom and someone who rents the "living room") chipping in to afford the 1400 for a 1 bedroom rent.

4) Who may have local supermarkets that just don’t stock diverse products like “agave nectar”. I will tell you for a fact that if you go to a poorer or more predominantly immigrant/minority neighborhood, you may have difficulty finding those products. If you live in NYC, unless you are really wealthy or well heeled you WILL live in a poorer or immigrant/minority predominant neighborhood.


I would like you to expound on the economic and sociological implications of your personal diet= (read) Can we safely assume that:

A) You don't live in or near a major metropolitan city where things are triple the price rate, food is not grown locally and specialty products associated with the middle class aren’t readily available in neighborhoods where some people have to live due to income restrictions.

B) You are upper middle class and live in a middle class suburb or you are WEALTHY especially if you ARE in a major city and that is why you can afford really high quality health food. I invite you to tour the grocery stores of your lower income brethren and find out just how often you have to read labels.

C) You are a stay at home mom, or a person whose job demands don't exceed the normal 35 hour week, therefore you have time to bake bread. If you lived in NYC, that would be VERY rare indeed!

I invite you to Google Brian Lehrer who did a very interesting radio program about this topic. Studies done in NYC found that low income neighborhoods have a two fold problem a) lack of access to "healthy food" and b) lack of resources to afford the "healthier alternative". I am merely offering suggestions for those of us who are unfortunate not to be able to walk in your shoes and get those steel cut oats, and agave nectar.

I don't think this is fair. I work 60-70 hours a week and I bake bread, and lots of other things too. It's actually not so labor intensive a process.

I do dry beans and my tips for you would be to look at getting a pressure cooker. I can cook black eyed peas (unsoaked) in 12 minutes with a pressure cooker. Sometimes I soak black beans or other beans in the morning and pressure cook them at night, same amount of time. If I don't soak black beans, then they take closer to 20-25 minutes in the pressure cooker.

I don't have experience doing it but others have told me that they use a crockpot. Basically put beans in crockpot in the morning, come home after work and they are done, no soaking necessary. Also, I tend to cook large batches of food on the weekends when I do have more time.

I don't know what type of work you do where you have the energy to bake bread after 60 hours a week. Kudos to you.

The recipe of dinner bread that I had involved me: sifting flour, kneading dough for 20 minutes, waiting for the dough to rise over night, and then baking the loaf for over 1 hour. Maybe there are shortcuts?

I design software.

There are shortcuts (namely, a Kitchenaid stand mixer with a dough hook to knead in half the time, and weighing flour out on kitchen scale to ensure proper weight which lets me skip sifting...oh, and using quick rise yeast so the first rise takes an hour...or even better, making no knead bread, where you stir some things together, let it sit for 24 hours, dump it out, and bake it) but even kneading by hand, it's not like you're "hands on" for all of that time. The parts you actually have to pay attention to take maybe 20 minutes total. I just incorporate that process into other things I'm doing...start a loaf, go do other things while it rises, pop in pan, go do other things while it bakes. You can also get a book on keeping bread dough around (like Artisan Bread in 5 min a day, for example), or make dough when you have time, then freeze rolls in a half-baked state until you need them.

My point was really that you can't judge people's free time/workload by the fact that they eat whole foods. In my opinion, if you make cooking from scratch a priority, you find ways to make it work into your schedule (pressure cookers or slow cookers for beans, cooking in batches, etc). We don't eat a lot of processed foods either, and we both work full-time or more than full-time jobs. Assuming that someone doesn't work because they cook from scratch seems like a big leap to me.

...this thread was better when we were talking about HFCS, not arguing about how much time/money we have.

I'm a part-time student, full time employee living in the DC area - things are by no means cheap here, my salary is not amazing, time is tight and I have to work on a very strict budget, especially since I'm paying my way through a (state) school. I still manage to eat very few processed foods.

I also make my own bread - I have a bread maker. I set it overnight and I wake up to a fresh loaf. I do a lot cooking with a crock-pot, also overnight, and this saves loads of time. If you make the time and budget your income, its not that hard to eliminate many processed foods from your diet.

I agree that inner-cities do have an access issue (my Master's degree is in Health, and this is a huge topic for us, especially being in the Baltimore/DC area where this is a HUGE problem), but its unfair to make assumptions like above.

As far as HCFS, I agree that the key is moderation. If you have a little bit of it every once in a while, its not going to kill you. I tend to have issues with these types of articles where they say THIS IS DEFINITELY GOING TO KILL YOU. Its all shock and awe and in 6 months there will be another study that says its fine...its very hard to find actual GOOD, unbiased research on this - so I just proceed with eating as many whole, healthy foods as possible and try not to worry if that ice pop is going to be the death of me.

Also glucose-fructose syrup.

Who funded the studies?

You are reading me wrong AND making a heck of a lot of assumptions based on what I choose to have in my pantry. I AGREE we should check labels when we are buying convenience and processed foods, but you are missing my point that by eating more whole foods, we'll have fewer labels to check. And in many cases, whole foods are often LESS expensive staples than the fancier processed convenience ones. Availability may not be that easy in the inner cities, but then again, when I lived in the SF Bay Area, I shopped some of the small markets, because of not having a car, and usually I could find some whole foods.

On the agave nectar, since you seem fixated on stuff like that, hubby is diabetic and he brought that home one day. I've since found it useful in sweetening home made salad dressings. But I could and would also use plain white sugar to do that. I just don't use MUCH of ANY sweetener is what it boils down to. Nor do I fix bread often. We eat more potatoes and rice for carb choices than bread.

Average box of cereal that contains who knows what, $3-6 these days. Carton of Quaker rolled oats, half that cost, easy to fix and one ingredient, oats. My package of steel cut oats from the local health food store, $1.32. Bottle of convenient, prepared salad dressing, probably $3-4. A teaspoon of oil and a teaspoon of vinegar (which is how I dress my salads) far less. I've learned to work with a "less is more" approach to my food.

True, not everyone has the same access or income or time. I feel fortunate and grateful that my husband and I have reasonably decent living circumstances, even if our neighborhood is poor, our house old and with issues, and we have gotten a late start in life on careers and savings. Retirement may not be an option. But everyone can make choices based on what they do have access to. At the very least, if all the access available is to highly processed foods, the choice can be made to eat less of them. To move more. Or maybe the choice is to count kitchen and food prep time as some of our activity and exercise.

We each have to decide what we are willing or not willing to put in our bodies. We each have to decide what resources and time we want to put into our health and what we might have to sacrifice to do so. And it always comes down to choices, no matter where one lives or what one's income level is. Even the inner city person may be able to choose a can of green beans that may have a minimal amount of HFCS over a soda with a maximal amount.

I got married with a $20 Wal-Mart ring and I'm not pushing hubby to buy me a real diamond, because the money is more wisely spent elsewhere. That's also why we don't have smart phones, data plans, broadband and a lot of other little luxuries. It's why we are still eating on a Salvation Army dining set. Most of my kitchen appliances like my food processor and bread machine are 20+ years old. We could spend money on gadgets and new stuff, instead, we spend on the best quality food we can manage, even if it's not all perfect. I'm not tossing those canned tomatoes that have HFCS, you can bet on that!

HFCS is just the latest thing touted as "causing obesity". Trans fats have been blamed, artificial sweeteners have been blamed... fast food has been blamed but obesity mostly boils down to eating too much and moving too little. People don't like hearing that, so it's easier to find some substance that is magically making us all fat to be scared of and avoid. I *know* what made me fat, and it was eating too much and keeping sedentary habits.

By the way, I lived in the SF Bay Area from 1978 - 2003. I *do* know about high rents, crammed living and barely scraping by. Hubby lived in the Washington D.C area in a tiny basement apartment with three roommates. I made poor food choices, but I also made some healthy ones. So did he. Even in a major metropolitan area, this is possible.