One reason behind the explosion of type 2 diabetes is the development of unnatural or artificial sweeteners.

Modern processed foods contain enormous amounts of high-fructose corn syrup. Even foods that are not ordinarily sweetened are made with this cheap, abundant, and highly addictive sugar, because it helps enable almost any food to look nice on the supermarket shelf, provided it is also laced with stabilizers and preservatives. Some of the findings of medical research concerning this highly processed, chemically altered sweetener are:

• women who drink two fructose-sweetened cola drinks every day are twice as likely to develop kidney disease
• soft drinks containing this sweetener have been linked to fatty liver disease
• high-fructose corn syrup causes your body to make less leptin, the hormone that lets your brain know when fat cells are full and further eating is not needed.

But the most insidious effect of high-fructose corn syrup is simply that it makes sweet junk food cheap and universally available… resulting in the chief risk factor for type 2 diabetes, obesity. In an era when nobody bought a pie or a candy bar because the sugar in them crystallized while the product sat on the shelf, sweets had to be made at home. That required work, and sweets were something special. Now sweets are available 24/7 everywhere, and the only thing that is special about them is that they make people sick.

This state of affairs probably won’t last forever. There may be a point at which the production of high-fructose corn syrup simply breaks down. As food expert Michael Pollan told the Washington Post in 2008, high-fructose corn syrup “may be cheap in the supermarket, but in the environment it could not be more expensive”.

“Most corn is grown as a monoculture, meaning that the land is used solely for corn, not rotated among crops. This maximizes yields, but at a price. It depletes soil nutrients, requiring more pesticides and fertilizer while weakening topsoil.”

He adds: “Then there is the atrazine in the water in farm country… a nasty herbicide that, at concentrations as little as 0.1 part per billion, has been shown to turn male frogs into hermaphrodites.”

Anything that turns males into hermaphrodites will eventually be taken out of food.

Make sure you read all food labels. High-fructose corn syrup can even be found in products which aren’t sweet, products such as sliced bread and processed meats, eg. ham and sausage. Soft drinks, sports drinks, lemonade, iced teas, and almost every sweet drink you can think of contains high-fructose corn syrup. So to avoid high-fructose corn syrup or even other sweeteners:

• limit processed and prepackaged foods
• eat fresh fruit rather than fruit juices or fruit flavored drinks
• drink less soda
• chose fruit canned in its own juice instead of heavy syrup

Avoiding high-fructose corn syrup and keeping your weight under control is one of the best things you can do to improve your health and avoid type 2 diabetes.

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