Studies involving rats show that when having access to junk food, pregnant rats ate roughly 40 percent more food and 56 percent more calories than rats who were fed just chow. Furthermore, once born, babies of the junk food rat mommas showed a preference for high fat and sugar foods and ate more than their chow fed peers.  Does this research translate to humans?

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I don’t drink it, my family doesn’t drink it, but millions do.

And if you believe the latest “Pemberton” ads, it’s got “No added preservatives. No artificial flavors. Never had it. Never will.”.

Watch the video here: Pemberton ad by Coca-Cola

What a load of malarkey!

Find out about Coca-Cola’s corporate abuses:

• KnowMore.org
• SourceWatch
• The Zero Coke Movement
• Killer Coke

Coke also owns Odwalla juices among its 450 brands, so buy a juicer or a find a local juice bar instead of giving Coke your money. Read up on greenwashing with the World Wildlife Fund (to the tune of $20 million).

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Editor’s Note: This post was provided by one of our paid sponsors, Earth Cinema Circle, the only DVD club dedicated to increasing social & environmental awareness through entertaining films. Written by Ariellie Ford.

Behind America’s 99-cent hamburgers and 72-ounce sodas is a key ingredient that silently fuels our fast-food nation — Corn. In KING CORN, we meet two college buddies, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who move from the east coast to the heartland to really learn where their food comes from.  They relocate to northern Iowa, home of their great-grandfathers, with a mission.  They will plant an acre of corn, follow their harvest into the world, and attempt to understand what all of us are really made of — Corn. This entertaining and informative film is now available from Earth Cinema Circle.  The following is from an interview with Curt Ellis, co-producer of the film.

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However, I always feel a pang of  ’green guilt,’ as I dutifully return the plastic bottles for recycling.  I had to consider that the plastic was made from petroleum, the bottles had to be shipped and it was all for an unneccessary food item. I found a brand of bubbly in glass containers, but the travel costs of our simple treat still nagged me.

My sister solved my dilemma with the best Christmas present ever! I am loving our new Soda Club Fountain Jet! Our starter kit came with soda flavors to add, but we’ve been happy with our bubbles and a squeeze of lemon or lime.

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But in addition to its recognizable forms, where the corn is recognizable as corn, there are untold numbers of additional places where we don't recognize it, but where corn forms the substance of our diet. And most of that has been highly processed.

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan recently, and it has been a very enlightening read. One of the most shocking things to discover was just how much corn is suffused throughout the typical American diet.

Pollan enlisted a scientist at Berkeley to do a breakdown of the percentage of corn in a range of McDonald's foods. They found that more than half of the content of most of the items they studied (French fries were the only exception) was corn-based: "Soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be a meal of a far more specialized kind of eater." These numbers seem unreasonable, until you consider that the beef and the chicken were fed a diet consisting mostly of corn, that sweeteners (particularly high fructose corn syrup), oils, and other food additives are manufactured from corn by-products.

Turning around the American diet to reduce the amount of corn we consume is not going to be an easy task. And it's not even necessarily a problem with the amount of corn that we eat as it is a problem with the way that we eat so much of the corn that we eat. Eating isn't even the only way we consume corn now. We're also putting it into our gas tanks as ethanol. In many ways, corn is emblematic of the larger issue of the industrialized, over-processed way so much of our consumption has been herded. More than anything, we need to become more enlightened about the wider effects of our consumption choices.

Corn is an energy-intensive crop to grow. It takes hundreds of pounds per acre of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce the glut of corn that becomes feedstock for so much of the industrialized American diet. The politics and complexities of government farm subsidies are nearly overwhelming, and certainly far beyond the scope of what I can write about here, but they are certainly a sizable part of the equation as well.

Along with trying to eat more local food and more whole food (meaning unprocessed or less-processed food, not the grocery chain), reducing the amount of corn in your diet is something to consider. From an overall green perspective, reducing your corn footprint could be one of the best things you can do. I haven't seen any hard numbers for it yet, but the advantages could be numerous. Reducing the amount of corn in your diet will help to reduce both carbon emissions and chemical pollution with farm runoff. And many of the corn by-products in food are sources of empty calories, so reducing the corn in your diet can also be a healthier step.

Cutting high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) out of your diet is going to be particularly difficult, because that sweetener has made its way into all manner of products. I started looking for bread that was not made with HFCS, and found it was a lot harder to find than I imagined. Almost all bread has HFCS high up on the ingredients list. One local store brand had a decent loaf that did not contain HFCS, but it was only sporadically available. More recently, a couple of the stores we shop at have had decent, store-label organic bread that is HFCS-free (organic HFCS is a virtual oxymoron, so organic choices are a good way to limit HFCS). But it's still in more of the foods I eat than I would like.