by Robert S. C. Cutler

Created on: April 28, 2008   Last Updated: April 29, 2008

Are we being poisoned?

Obesity; Autism: These are just two of the medical terms not common in the seventies or even eighties. Chances were, in those decades and the decades preceding, the average American didn't know someone with either affliction. Now the opposite is true and a matter of everyday life. Of course we all knew someone classified as "fat" back then, but what we considered as overweight in the seventies might very well be considered normal to today's standards. Autism was such a rare affliction that children and adults were often viewed as oddities. Americans had the "it couldn't happen to my child" approach concerning the condition.

I am far from being an expert. My chosen profession is in the aerospace industry not the medical field, so I'm not professing to be all knowledgeable when it comes to theses two seemingly epidemics. What the United States is experiencing, however, doesn't take an extensive education to understand. In my view of the world, I wholly believe we are being poisoned by the every day food we consume.

An article for MayoClinic.com, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/high-fructose-corn- syrup claims, "Some nutrition experts blame increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup for the growing obesity problem. One theory is that fructose is more readily converted to fat by your liver than is sucrose, increasing the levels of fat in your bloodstream. But this hasn't been proved." This is just one of many studies covering high-fructose corn syrup, but seems to hit on what some people have been suspecting.

According to the article "The murky World of High Fructose Corn Syrup" by Linda Joyce Forristal, CCP, MTA and found at http://www.westonaprice.org "The process for making the sweetener high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) out of corn was developed in the 1970s. Use of HFCS grew rapidly, from less than three million short tons in 1980 to almost 8 million short tons in 1995. During the late 1990s, use of sugar actually declined as it was eclipsed by HFCS. Today Americans consume more HFCS than sugar."

Contrary to popular belief, not every obese person in our country had an addiction to fast food. I have a close relative that has a life threatening weight problem. He doesn't eat fast food and doesn't have a family history of obesity. His main diet consists of the products available off of the grocery store shelves. He hasn't had pop, diet or regular, in over a year and still has issues. His favorite food is chicken wings cooked with Italian

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