A good summary about High-Fructose Corn Syrup, the ties to industrials, and the impact on health:
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food...farm-bill.html
Most notably: "Over the past three decades, U.S. consumption of high-fructose corn syrup has jumped 1,000 percent." Weren't we saying that the obesity rates have been skyrocketing in the past two or three decades?
I don't know then if the problem is then "the American diet" (a mix of German and Irish cuisine, both countries having much smaller obesity rates) or the fact that industrials replaced natural sugar by processed crap to make cheaper (but worse for you) products and lobbied the US Government to avoid any kind of criticism or regulations (cf when they tried to rename it to "corn sugar" to fool people better). People that would have been healthy eating with the same diet as their grandparents' ended up actually eating much more calories than them because of food industries.
Again, some will say that I'm trying to find excuses, but I'm not; I do believe that exercise and a balanced diet are important, but I'm just saying that if the industrials radically change the contents of food behind your back and add calories to everything you eat, it's going to be much harder for people to be healthy in general. "Everyone should exercise" is not gonna work as well as "Everyone should fight against putting HFCS everywhere in food".
Another graph showing another problem: the US subventions for agriculture vs what you should eat:
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food...youre-fat.html
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food...youre-fat.html
Fruit and vegetable get 1% of the total food subsidy. If you wanted to subsidize food fairly, so that the food type you should eat X% of gets X% of the subsidies, you have to cut subsidies to meat and dairy by 75% and increase subsidies to fruit and vegetable by 900%.
Again, it's not looking for excuses, but just being aware that the market is shaped by lobbies and government policies that are inadequate compared to what is healthy food or not, and it's heavily influencing consumers' choices and steering them away from healthy food. Of course you can be careful about what you eat, but when government subsidies make meat too cheap and vegetables too expensive, it just makes it much harder; to me, that's where the biggest problem lies.
I'd be interested in knowing the figures for Canada, but I wouldn't be surprised if the subventions were skewed in Canada too. And the US subventions have an impact on Canadian society, since there's a lot of food imported from the US, so part of the problem in Canada is tied to the same problem in the US.
Also, if you were looking for another reason to hate HFCS industries, apparently last year HFCS producers had an ad about how you were a racist snob if you didn't want HFCS in your food (I can't find the video on youtube though, but SNL had a parody of that apparently):
http://www.treehugger.com/culture/sn...ads-video.html