Corn fed: Study finds most fast food made of corn

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The label on the Big Mac you just ingested might boast that it has an all beef patty, but a new study from researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology suggests that it might be more chemically accurate to label it as all corn.

 

And the burgers – which, the study proves, are made out of corn-fed cows – aren’t the only corn-centric items on the menu. Indeed, the study, which included an analysis of some 480 fast-food burgers, found that there are traces of corn in almost all fast food items. The chicken that made those nuggets? Corn fed. The fries? Coated in corn oil. The condiments and sodas? Why, they’ve all had a run in with high fructose corn syrup.

 

So, they’re corn-based. What’s the big deal? Well, I hate corn.

 

“But why?” I hear you all protest, “what did this seemingly innocuous vegetable ever do to you?” And therein lies the problem. Corn is not a vegetable, it’s a grain, and a pretty crumby one at that. Of all the grains, corn is one of the most sugary, starchy, nutritionally void and generally worthless grains out there. And yet, corn is a foundation of the American diet, cropping up (no pun intended) in oil or syrup form in just about every processed food cluttering the middle aisles of your grocery store.

 

Beyond semantics, the main reason I don’t like corn is because of the damage it wreaks on the body. Evolutionarily speaking, our bodies were never designed to handle a corn-based diet and, as such, when we come into contact with it (and other grains),  we experience a series of physiological and chemical responses that not only tell us to store energy as fat, but also results in a small, but none-the-less significant, amount of inflammation.

 

In addition, environmentally speaking, corn has been singled out as an unsustainable crop that uses an obscene amount of water, chemicals and energy to bring it to harvest. How’s that for a carbon footprint?

 

Now, the point of this article is not necessarily to blast on all corn-based products. Rather, it is to warn you that perhaps corn isn’t the culinary staple that society and the medical community would have us believe.