I just made this post in a raw foods forum and thought it would be a good post to make on this blog. What I’m about to share with you has helped me in my resolve to return to a 100% raw food diet and has helped speed the return.
Hopefully you’ll see why as you read this.
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I just recently realized how horrible sugar is. What’s worse is corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup. Finding out what it actually does motivated me to eliminate corn syrup in all forms from my diet (yes, I chose to slip back into old eating habits over the holidays, too).
The following is taken from “This Crazy Vegan Life: A Prescription for an Endangered Species” by Christina Pirello (page 58 — you can preview the book on Amazon — and she is a “cooker”… 
— but the info is still relevant):
“…high-fructose corn syrup actually triggers overeating because it inhibits the secretion of the hormone leptin, the single element that signals that you are full and should stop eating. Eating foods with high-fructose corn syrup can cause you to consume three hundred more calories than you need before your body gets the message that it has been fed at all!”
She goes on to state that Americans consumed an average of one pound of high-fructose corn syrup a year in 1970; that average jumped to 63 pounds a year in 2004. It has been used in food products since the early 1980s — and the epidemic rise in obesity can (coincidentally?) be traced to the early 1980s.
If you were to eat something with high-fructose corn syrup just once a day (not too terribly uncommon amongst S.A.D. followers), that would mean an additional 109,500 calories per year — or an extra 31 pounds of weight to deal with annually (assuming that 3500 excess calories leads to one pound of weight gain).
And taking it a step further, government farm subsidies end up making corn syrup cheaper than regular sugar, which makes it tremendously profitable for everybody involved in channeling it to American consumers — which, of course, just encourages everybody to use it even more. Unless it’s an organic product, it would be difficult to find a prepared product in a store that does not contain corn syrup in some form.
It’s no wonder Americans are so obese.
Corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup are bad. It’s been proven that they make you overeat — plus you are overeating sugar, which puts additional strains on your body.
Hopefully this will help solidify your convictions to give up cooked food a bit (especially baked sweet goods, like marshmallow bars… 
). I know it helped me a lot.
Smacznego,
Tom
P.S. — If you’re not quite ready for 100% raw, “cooked” vegan will be much better for you than the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.), so check out Christina Pirello’s book.
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