In the US one in four foods contains corn, but most of it is hidden. Unappetising sounding ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and citric acid (both of which are in your coca cola) along with monosodium glutamate and sorbitol are tucked away in the small print so that most people don’t notice them.

Not only do we not know what we’re eating, we also don’t know what the stuff we’re eating is doing to us, and there are some very concerning signs that everyday foods could be causing us serious harm.

My wake up call: what soya did to me and a Dr pal

My housemate is a doctor and mentioned her periods had stopped for no apparent reason (squeamish boys, man up). I was surprised because mine had become irregular too. She mentioned it to another doctor who asked if we ate soya. Hell yeah, every day! We had soya milk with our tea and porridge in what we thought was a healthy breakfast. So we stopped drinking soya…and our periods returned as normal. A food and health expert pal called Rich Enion explains that ‘soya contains toxins and plant oestrogens powerful enough to disrupt women’s menstrual cycles’ – and it’s also linked to cancer, ADHD, loads of things that I’d certainly like to try and avoid. If it’s doing that to women and our government and food industry aren’t mentioning it what else is happening?

88% of corn and 94% of soya beans are GM’d in the US. Despite claims by the producers that this is safe we don’t know what GM is doing to us, but several studies poke big holes in the GM industry’s claims that it’s crops are safe and benevolent. These studies suggest that GM does not improve farming and in fact poses very serious health risks. That study also found that mice eating GM corn weighed more than mice eating normal corn. That could be seen as a positive thing if you’re starving, but it’s not doing any favours to the obesity epidemic.

How smart and sweet are our governments?

We don’t need any refined sugar in our diet, at all. It’s just there for fun – eating a massive cake is like getting drunk with your mates; it’s silly, but it can be really fun. But seeing as refined sugar causes obesity (check out Dr Lustig’s brilliant Sugar: The Bitter Truth) and heart disease, and many scientists think we’re literally addicted to it (hence the 4 o’clock in the afternoon cravings) people draw parallels with smoking.

When evidence showed that cigarettes were killing us, governments eventually introduced legislation to encourage citizens to stop smoking. What’s happening with sugar? The UK’s largest EU farm subsidies go to the sugar producer Tate and Lyle, and Nestle are second. Actually there are two things that make that statistic even more ominous. Farm Subsidy revealed that 92% of the EU subsidies aren’t even published (they made a good little film on that here) and if you take a look at Tate and Lyle’s website one of their main ingredients isn’t even sugar cane, it’s corn… which they use to make high fructose corn syrup…which is what Dr Lustig’s video (above) explains causes obesity.

In the US a report found that subsidies in the Farm Bill overwhelmingly went to ingredients that fuel the junk food industry – not fresh fruits and vegetables. This means that the prices of corn, soya and their derivatives (like high fructose corn syrup), are artificially cheap, which makes them more appealing to buyers. That’s massive manipulation of the market – us. So Good.Is made a frightfully good infographic about it, which you can see here, and the King of Corn made a very excellent film about it too:

‘The American food system is built on the abundance of corn, an abundance perpetuated by a subsidy system that pays farmers to maximize production’

Those US billion dollar subsidies are also starving sub-Saharan Africa. The US food industry lobbies hard for these subsidies and trade agreements, which keep US food prices artificially low and attractive to us consumers. By doing so these low prices create a pincer attack on the sub-Saharan food industry. Firstly it makes the largest corn market in the world inaccessible to other countries because they simply can’t compete with the artificially low prices. In her book ‘Winner Takes All‘ Dambisa Moyo explains ‘Oxfam estimated that Malawi could have significantly increased exports to the European Union in 2004 had market restrictions not deprived it of a potential US$32 million in foreign exchange earnings, equivalent to around half the country’s pubic health care budget. As a result of the huge subsidies, some six million rural households across the Atlantic Ocean in Central and West Africa were unable to compete in the huge US markets, despite lower production costs.’

That’s even though these sub-Saharan counties have most of the potential tillable land left in an increasingly land scarce world. Blocked out of the largest global markets, the sub-Saharan agriculture industries don’t develop.

On the flip side these subsidies also mean the US agricultural industries over-produce corn, creating the food surplus mountains. This Good.is infographic shows how the US wastes 40% of its food (the UK and much of the rest of the world aren’t much better, check out this great TED by Tristram Stuart).

The second prong in this pincer attack is that Western aid for Africa has also shifted over the last 30 years, from financial support aiding the development of agriculture infrastructure, to actual food. Dambisa Moyo explains that ‘in a cruel shift, that food is actually from the very food mountain that represents the effects of the subsidies.’ So rather than supporting the development of infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, the US palms it off with its surplus food.