Fantasie Calvé

De laatste alinea van Pollan bevat een fout: Suikerriet is ook een C4-plant.

Net als bijvoorbeeld gierst, het gewas wat vroeger erg veel als veevoer werd gekweekt.

Er zijn wetenschappers die Amerikanen wandelende maïskoekjes noemen door de hoeveelheden HFCS welke ze consumeren...

Dat klopt niet helemaal Jacobus. Die bewering slaat op de hoeveelheid mais die ergens in de voedselketen zit; niet om HFCS speciefiek. Het is zo dat mais op een vrij unieke wijze zijn koolstof uit de lucht opneemt; het is een zogenaamde C4-plant (Michael Pollan beschrijft dat in The Omnivore's Dilemma). Zo'n C4-plant neemt een iets andere samenstelling van isotopen C13 en C12 op dan bijvoorbeeld aardappelen of bomen. Die veranderde isotopenverhouding is daarna herkenbaar in menselijk weefsel.

Hier een stuk van Pollan zelf:

Some carbon atoms called isotopes, have
more than the usual complement of six protons and six neutrons, giving them a slightly different atomic weight. C-13, for examples, has six protons and seven neutrons. (Hence “C-13.”) For whatever reason, when a C-4 plant goes scavenging for its four-packs of carbon, it takes in more carbon 13 than ordinary—C-3—plants, which exhibit a marked preference for the more common carbon 12. Greedy for carbon, C-4 plants can’t afford to discriminate among isotopes, and so end up with relatively more carbon 13.The higher the ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 in a person’s flesh, the more corn has been in his diet—or in the diet of the animals he or she ate. (As far as we’re concerned, it makes little difference whether we consume relatively more or less carbon 13.)

One would expect to find a comparatively great deal of carbon 13 in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn—Mexicans, most famously.Americans eat much more wheat than corn—114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the more refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people (except perhaps the proud corn-fed Midwesterners, and they don’t know the half of it), though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little oldfashioned.

Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn’t lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of North Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. “When you look at the isotope ratios,” Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who’s done this sort of research, told me, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.

So that’s us: processed corn, walking.

Pollan gebruikt de term 'corn chips with legs' of 'processed corn, walking'.

HFCS is dan ook niet zo zeer een giftig product...

@P, Dat is verhelderend. Kende het product niet.
Voor e anderen die dit ook niet kenden :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup