Movie King Corn: Is Corn Making Us Fat?

Is Corn Making Us Fat?

Thanks to our friend, Bob, who recommended we watch the movie, “King Corn“. VERY interesting…disturbing, actually. It was a documentary, but very well done and more like watching a good story. It's about a couple friends who move to Iowa to grow an acre of corn, and then follow it to see where it ends up in the food supply. (Sounds riveting, I know. Trust me, it really is interesting!)

Michael Pollan is in the film, and explains how corn-heavy our diets have become, especially in fast food and processed foods.

Here's where the corn is in a typical fast food meal of burger, fries and pop:

• Corn in the beef – confinement cattle farms typically stuff their cows full of corn (usually genetically modified) because it's cheap food that fattens them up fast – the problem is, cows were never meant to eat that way, so they are often unhealthy. This results in more antibiotics, and then when we eat that beef, we are becoming more and more resistant to those antibiotics – this is no small thing, we could need them to save our lives someday. (According to the movie, 70% of the antibiotics in the U.S. are used on cattle.) (Where to find healthy meat.)
  
• The poison sticks (fries) are most likely fried in corn or other vegetable oils (unhealthy oils), and often it's also partially hydrogenated (trans fats)
• The pop is mostly high fructose corn syrup, and we all know how rotten that is.

Quotes from the movie:

“Lots of corn is the raw material for an overweight society.”

“It's the crop that supersized America.”

“We're not growing quality, we're growing crap.”

What's wrong with all this corn you ask?

They use GM corn (resistant to pesticides) so they can spray the heck out of their crops to get a very high yield (the health of the people eventually ingesting all those chemicals isn't a priority).

I thought Michael Pollan made a great point in this movie when he told about the irony of it all – this corn isn't edible as it is when harvested, it's only used after it's been highly processed, so for the first time in history, Iowa farmers can't feed themselves off their land anymore! I got the impression that the farmers in this movie weren't proud of what they were doing, but they feel stuck. If they don't play the game, they just don't make a decent living.

What they're turning all this corn into is, like the quote above, nothing but crap for our bodies.

What to do?

You'll never guess what I'm going to say, well, OK, I guess you probably already did: avoid as much fast food and processed foods as possible, this means getting away from boxes and bags as much as you can – I still have a ways to go! But also, once again, buy more organic so at least we know we're not getting any genetically modified corn.

Where else is all this corn?

You name it. It's everywhere. Watch this video from ABC News, you'll be very surprised.

• WATCH THE KING CORN TRAILER!
• Buy the King Corn DVD

• Check out the latest awesome deals I've found on coconut oil
• Healthy alternatives to fast food
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