Sugar, sugar

Anyone who has had Mexican Coca-cola knows its a different product than the vastly inferior American version. That’s why there’s a gray market in Mexican soda in America, where Coke tries to keep what it bottles in Mexico out of the States to protect the turf arrangements it has worked out with its bottlers. Why is the Mexican coke so much better? It has real sugar in it. The American Prospect‘s blog had several posts about sugar versus high-fructose corn syrup recently, pointing out that the point at which sugar became more expensive than HFCS, Amercians started becoming obese and soft drinks began to suck. Sugar is grown cheaply in the Caribbean and Central American countries, so why is it so expensive in America. What happened to CAFTA? The reason why HFCS is cheaper than sugar is that the American agribuisiness lobby—corn-growers and sugar growers in America—united to make sugar an exception to free trade so that sugar prices would remain high and the sales of corn would increase. So in short, just another way that America protects the profit margins of its businesses at the expense of the health of our children, who likely consume the bulk amount of HFCS.