A simple misconception is that correlation means causation, which is not true. First off yes, high fructose corn syrup is bad if taken regularly, but the data doesn’t give enough information. It could be that this data was taken from people that simply don’t exercise. In order to know whether this data is valid or not we would need to know what the general population was. Some people are more likely to be obese because of genetics, their intake of HFCS could just speed up the process, however if we were to get rid of HFCS and just replace it with natural cane sugar we wouldn’t necessarily be better off. It is believed that HFCS is as bad as sugar. Beil, L. (2013,Jun 01).
High fructose corn syrup has been around for about 35 years and there was never any controversy about what it did. (Klurfeld, D., Foreyt, J., Angelopoulos, T., & Rippe, J. (2013) High fructose corn syrup was …show more content…
Just because they are both increasing equally does not mean that they are causes of each other, it could just be a coincidence. According to John White HFCS intake has been decreasing since 2004 yet the obesity levels continue to increase.( Klurfeld, D., Foreyt, J., Angelopoulos, T., & Rippe, J. (2013) The graph does not show this, which in some sense makes the data biased and invalid. It may have just been a marketing technique to get people to buy sucrose again, if this was the case we know very well it worked.
A more recent graph shows that the amount of HFCS intake decreased significantly from 2000-2010, yet the obesity level continued to increase, this shows that there is no general correlation between HFCS and obesity.(Is Sugar Responsible for Obesity) The point here is that HFCS and sugar are considered to be equally as bad. Both HFCS and sucrose CAN cause obesity however it does not mean that it