(www.sass-pants.com) — I love those commercials from the Corn Refiners Association that suggest that health-conscious parents and other adults are morons for wanting to avoid high-fructose corn syrup. But I love even more what The Consumerist had to say about it: “All we managed to glean from the commercials is that not consuming high fructose corn syrup makes you rude.”
I’m no scientist and I’m certainly not a registered dietitian, but even I can see a correlation between the increasing presence of high-fructose corn syrup in the American diet and the prevalence of obesity in the US population. It doesn’t take an idiot to draw a correlation there. Yeah, sweet stuff is fine in moderation, but we had sweet stuff in moderation before, too, and it was never this bad. So that’s alarming.
And this week, MSNBC, The Washington Post, US News & World Report, and others reported on studies that revealed the presence of mercury in foods containing high-fructose corn syrup. The Corn Refiners Association was quick to deny the claims, suggesting that the study was based on “outdated information of dubious significance,” but I’d expect them to say that immediately while doing their own research to confirm or deny. Not saying they’re liars or anything, but saying it makes sense for them to say it’s not true.
But here’s what alarms me about all of this.
In tandem with increasing use of high-fructose corn syrup, we have increasingly prevalent obesity and diabetes. But we also have increasing incidence of autism, which many believe is related to routine childhood vaccines, many of which have long contained mercury. So not only are we injecting mercury, but we may also be consuming it in a huge proportion of foods we, particularly children, eat on a daily basis. That would certainly would explain the astronomical jump in autism in the US recent years, wouldn’t you say?
Why aren’t more people making this connection? And what are we going to do about it?
Contents Copyright © 2009 Kristen King
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Didn’t they finally remove the mercury from vaccines, even the “trace” amounts?
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@allena, you would think, but unfortunately, no. According to the CDC, “Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza (flu) vaccines, thimerosal is not used as a preservative in routinely recommended childhood vaccines.” But it’s still in other vaccines. And in some places, mercury was replaced with aluminum, which some believe is even worse than mercury.
Why aren’t more people making this connection?
Because actual researchers know that there is no link between mercury and autism?
Maybe because there is actually a negative correlation between thimerosal? The rates of thimerosal have dropped dramatically at the same time autism rates have risen. We can’t even actually prove that autism rates are going up, we just know that there are more children being diagnosed.
In fact some researchers are convinced that the current rate of autism is nothing new we a simply being more accurate in diagnosing the condition. In the past many children with severe autism would have simply been labeled with and “Intellectual disability” or a “mental retardation” and those with mild autism would probably never be diagnosed with anything and just considered “weird” by family.
For example Daniel Tammet is a famous autistic savant, but being born in the 70’s he was never diagnosed with autism until well into adulthood, after he entered the public eye for his superhuman math abilities.
@hypatia, the definition of “actual researchers” seems to vary, and not everyone agrees with you. I do appreciate your comment and your continuing the dialogue, and you’re so right that we’re able to diagnose mental and physical disabilities with more clarity than we have in the past. But I don’t agree that “real research” definitively disproves a link between mercury and autism or vaccines and autism. There is a lot of gray in this debate.
There is indeed a lot of gray regarding autism.
I haven’t done enough reading about all the possible autism causes out there to really form an opinion (one that I’d stand by, anyway), but I do think it’s a bit arrogant for anyone to just completely cross off any chance that we could actually be doing things to ourselves (not saying the above commenter, hypatia, is being arrogant – that comment just got me thinking). I mean, we can get diabetes from obesity. We can become obese from eating too much. We can give ourselves heart disease and strokes and cancer from having poor diets, not properly managing stress, and smoking. Why is it so hard to wrap our brains around the possibility that other illnesses and conditions could very well be caused by our own actions and environmental influences? It shouldn’t be.
I think people like Jenny McCarthy get way to much flack for thinking outside the box (when sometimes, “outside the box” seems like common sense). Kudos to you for writing this, Kristen.
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Actually, USA gov. Has acknowledged the link between mercury & autism so do your home work & stop being a jackass. Out of court settlement say whatt. mercury binds to receptor sites & doesnt leave & you think theirs “no link”? n00b.