King Corn: the documentary
posted in Diet, Research & Science, Environment |I haven’t had any reviews of books or documentaries but that is all about to change. I just saw “King Corn” and was blown away. This is an informative, important look at how the Standard American Diet or SAD 
as is more appropriate has far reaching effects on our health and how corn is an integral ingredient in this toxic potion.
The film begins when we meet Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis getting their hair analyzed. Hair is a tape recorder of diet and the isotope analysis shows that the carbon in their body primarily originates from corn. They are made out of corn!
Our diets will shorten our generations lifespan and this will be the first time we live shorter lives then the previous generation. Anyone in the health care field can see this process happening.
So what do they do? Best friends Ian and Curt move to Greene, Iowa to grow an acre of corn and experience what it is like and where the corn goes. They grow Yellow Dent Corn, a field corn destined for cattle feed or industrial processing - this isn’t your Hamptons sweet corn.
They produce about 180 bushels of corn, or 5 tons of food per acre, about 10,000 pounds. It took them 31,000 seeds per acre to produce this yield and with the sophisticated machinery only 18 minutes to plant.
Some corn ends up being made into industrial products that become processed foods. Just about every processed food out there contains corn solids, high fructose corn syrup, or some other hydrolyzed corn product hidden behind a chemical name. 70% of high fructose corn syrup ends in beverages. One of the scary ingredients in corn syrup is sulfuric acid, or what you may be more familiar with - battery acid.
But the real scary part is that most of this corn ends up feeding livestock - and this is how we become made up of corn. We eat meat that is made of corn, thus we are made of corn.
For instance, grass-fed free-range livestock take several years to reach maximum yield. This is too slow. So what do they do? They don’t let them move - thats what feedlots are for. Cattle are fed a corn diet for up to 150 days. But they start getting sick with something called acidosis. This is fatal unless treated. This is why livestock consume 70% of the antibiotics used in this country (low doses to combat acidosis). Guess where these antibiotics wind up…yup, in you.
Grain fed livestock is obese (like we get from processed foods), muscle tissue looks more like fat. For instance there are 9 grams of saturated fat verse 1.3 grams of saturated fat per grass fed cow. Hamburgers are fat disguised as meat (65 % of calories are fat). But we can’t blame the producers- Americans demand cheap food so the cycle continues. 16% of our individual wealth is spent on food. This is the best case scenario, 50 years ago this number was double. We are the first generation where abundance brings too much and shortens our lifespan.
Here is the counterpoint put out by the Corn Association.
