'King Corn' opened my eyes to high fructose corn syrup

"King Corn" is an independent film based in Iowa. It follows two east coast college students, who figure out that they have family roots in the same small Iowa town. They spend a summer growing one acre of corn, to better understand the impact and the inner workings.

What they learn is pretty shocking, regarding the government subsidies that are provided to farmers. Most farmers make very little money, since the cost of a bushel of corn is kept so low. The subsidies allow the farmer to make just enough money to survive. You would think this would be a good thing, but it drives them to produce the wrong kind of corn, not the edible kind.

They also explore where a typical acre of corn goes (not as corn-on-the-cob, as you might think), along with the environmental impact of that corn. You would think that corn has to be good for us, and growing more would be a good thing, but this film clearly shows how bad things have gotten. The amount that goes to overfeed cows for meat is also shocking!

However, the biggest shocker for me was the amount of corn going to create high fructose corn syrup. This product has basically no nutritional value, and has replaced sugar in almost every food we eat nowadays. It drives our obesity problem, and since it is so inexpensive (government funded), it is now less expensive to buy food that is bad for you (cupcakes, soda, chips, etc) than buying healthy fruits and vegetables!

They also recently released a supplemental short film called "Big River", which explores the impact of farming (pesticides and runoff) on the water streams, which all eventually flow down into the mouth of the Mississippi River (the "dead zone").

This movie was exactly what I needed to see, in order to finally convince me to cut back even more on eating meat, and now I'm severly reducing my consumption of products with high fructose corn syrup!