Big Sugar Versus Big Corn

A battle has been waged for years between the sugar refiners and the corn refiners:

The corn refinery and sugar industries, bitter rivals in the manufacture of billions of dollars’ worth of sweeteners for sodas and other high-calorie foods, covertly funded dueling nonprofit groups in Washington in a multiyear effort to grab market share, while also stoking fears among consumers about possible health risks, court records made public in a federal lawsuit between the two parties show.
The lawsuit, which has brought hundreds of pages of secret corporate emails and strategy documents into the public domain, demonstrates how Washington-based groups and academic experts frequently become extensions of corporate lobbying campaigns as rival industries use them to try to inflict damage on their competitors or defend their reputations against such assaults.
In this case, academic research published a decade ago suggested that high-fructose corn syrup, the popular food additive, might be a less healthy sweetener than sugar and perhaps even partly responsible for rising obesity and diabetes.
Stung by such assertions, which the corn industry insisted were false, farming giants including Archer Daniels Midland, of Decatur, Ill., and Cargill, of Minneapolis, began an effort through their Washington trade group, the Corn Refiners Association, to rebut these studies and to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to declare its syrup “natural” and allow a more approachable product name, like “corn sugar.”
While these actions have already been the subject of public debate, the corporate documents show that the sugar and corn industries collectively spent tens of millions of dollars to influence public opinion, at times without full public disclosure, about the risks or benefits of using high-fructose corn syrup.
The public relations campaign by the Corn Refiners Association was the most extensive, spending more than $30 million since 2008, budget documents released as part of the lawsuit suggest.

The funny part is, if it wasn't for huge surpluses of corn for years and extremely high tariffs to protect sugar cane and sugar beet growers, high fructose corn syrup wouldn't exist.  I'm sure the folks at ADM get pissed when they see folks drinking throwback Pepsi or Mountain Dew.  Overall, I don't think anybody can tell a difference between high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar in processed foods, but Big Sugar has done a hell of a job convincing consumers HFCS is poison.  As if cane sugar is good for you.