The sugar extracted for corn syrup is mostly just glucose. For HCFS, half of it is chemically processed into fructose, then mixed with the glucose. But it’s just mixed, and then they react however they happen to – quite a lot different than how the sugar cane plant pairs them up and bonds the pairs together.

This sort of elides the role of corporate lobbyists in creating the situation in the first place. It’s not like the evil government maintains these tariffs for no reason while noble food manufacturers work night and day to provide us with cheap food despite these machinations; rather you have entities like the above-mentioned ADM, gaming the system so as to maximize demand for their product.

I doubt if your taste buds can tell the difference between a coke made with hfcs or sugar

Guess again. I don’t drink soda any more (HFCS and sugar are both bad for you) but passing the hfcs/sugar taste test is trivial.

Junkfood Science has a good article on this

I cut out HFCS from my diet because it is, by it’s nature, very unhealthy. Most doctors and diet industry “experts” teach people to fear fat, particularly animal fat. The more I read, the more the evidence runs to the contrary: the worst culprit for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. is sugars (like HFCS)–not because of mercury, but by their very nature in how they affect metabolism. Richard Nikoley (who unfortunately doesn’t blog about politics any more) has been citing study after study which debunk the common wisdom about healthy diets. (My own personal anectdote is that I’ve dropped 30 pounds in 3 months, on a diet rich in animal fats, generally following Nikoley’s evolutionary fitness regime.)

I do eat lots of fish and take fish oil tablets, without worrying about the mercury levels. The benefits outweigh the risk, by a long shot.

The poison is in the dose. If you drink too much water too fast, it messes up your electrolyte balance and could kill you. If you ingest a sufficiently small amount of mercury — or Bisphenol-A, or whatever other scary “chemical” is in the news — your body will likely get rid of it before it gets to be a problem. Most things that we need to live are toxic in too-high quantities.

But math is hard. Much easier to freak out over the threat du jour and abdicate all responsibility to think.

Asbestos is another example of something that is dangerous only in certain forms. As dust, asbestos is very dangerous to the lungs. However, when wet, it’s not dangerous because it cannot become airborne. If eaten, it presents no danger to any other organ.

I’ve heard stories of people (and governments) so worried over asbestos exposure in homes back east, they had the asbestos removed from gravity feed boiler pipes. The steam was supposed to ride up the pipes, allowing the cooled steam (water) to run back down the pipes.

When the asbestos insulation was removed from the pipes, so much heat was lost from the steam through the now uninsulated pipes, the boiler couldn’t provide the heat that it could originally.

The moral of the story is: Asbestos is only dangerous in dust form, often when it’s cut. Once it’s installed, it very safe, and very fire proof.