By now I'm sure most people have seen the television ad campaign extolling the virtues of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and directing viewers to sweetsurprise.com to get the "facts" about High Fructose Corn Syrup.

What Sweet Surprise fails to mention is covered nicely by The Murky World of High Fructose Corn Syrup. HFCS is made by refining corn starch via a number of enzymatic reactions. The enzymes used to break down the corn starch into fructose and glucose, which are mixed into the corn starch mixture, are made from genetically engineered microbes.

Moreover, contrary to the claims of sweetsurprise.com, the health effects of HFCS are considerably greater than those of standard table sugar. Fructose can only be removed by the liver, and the high concentration and ready absorption of the fructose in HFCS can cause cardiovascular and metabolic disorders. The claims made by sweetsurprise.com - that HFCS is both natural and healthy - are simply false. The only reason corn syrup is so ubiquitous is because corn production is subsidized by the U.S. government.

I just finished reading one of the most disturbing articles I've seen in some time: Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse Than We Know, by Kevin Phillips, in May's Harper's Magazine.

Phillips documents the changes that various administrations have made to the statistical methodology used in calculating the three major economic indicators: GDP, CPI, and Unemployment. Since 1961, nearly every U.S. president has "tweaked" the calculation of these numbers to mask certain politically inexpedient economic realities.

The cumulative result of these successive tweaks has been a severe case of what Phillips terms "Pollyanna Creep." The true health of the economy has come to be severely overstated by inflated statistics. Keep Reading >>