If you believe that McDonalds is the only one stuffing natural-looking food with HFCS, you are mistaken. And while educated people expect fast food burgers to be bad for you, the salads look like a smarter, reasonable choice (even though they often have more calories than the burger, even though the chicken is injected… not all places require calorie counts on the menu.) You will also find that many sit-down restaurants give the same preparation to their meat.

Time and time again has shown that every health (or financial…) crisis starts with moralizing. Which never works. Only when reform and legislation occur do things get better. But it's an appealing strategy because it feels good to the moralizer, and doesn't take any work.

The food industry knows what it's doing, does it on purpose [1], with government dollars. Government subsidies to individuals go to processed foods (because natural ingredients are more expensive), then those government dollars also end up in the pockets of corporations using government money to undercut prices thanks to industry corn subsidies.

Even if everyone were suddenly to start cooking all their meals and never eating out or buying any premade ingredients, that raw chicken at your local grocery store is also a lot less benign that you think. Most whole chickens are injected with all kinds of things.[2] At Whole Foods in NYC, I once bought a (very small) organic chicken that cost $16.

Of course, cooking home meals requires A) living in a place where you can cook, B) growing up understanding cooking is an option, C) understanding that food can even be dangerous, D) not living in one of America's many, very large food deserts [3]. And that's assuming you're not relying on government assistance to feed your baby… or should we say, feed your baby corn syrup? [4] And let's not forget school breakfasts and lunches for poor kids.[5]

Oh sure, in a perfect world, everybody has perfect information and the ability to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about their food. Not to mention access to grocery stores with healthy food. But in THIS world, you've got an ouroboros of government money funding and institutionalizing a crisis: from government subsidies to produce HFCS lowering the cost of very unhealthy and addictive foods, to government money paying for baby formula laced with HFCS made by the companies that benefit from the government subsidies for growing corn (a delicious double dip). Government cheese is even more addictive than HFCS. Hence, legislation.

[1] Certainly not the canonical reporting on the problem, but this NYT article about the intentional design of addictive food just came out yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicke...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

[4] http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies

[5] http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-p...

EDIT: One last thing. Not only is HFCS/CS a major ingredient in such seemingly trustworthy, reputable foods such as Mott's Apple Sauce, and probiotic yogurt, it's also found in pet food. Yes, pet food. I recently adopted a cat with an autoimmune problem and I ended up researching pet health issues. Pet diabetes is increasing terribly.[6] Cats have other health problems caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to get pet food, no matter how expensive, without biologically unnecessary sugars and starches -- which cats, pure carnivores, not only don't need, but suffer from. Dogs don't need corn syrup, either.

[6] http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report...