this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Corn. It is a fact that the number of autoimmune diseases are rising. I read a NHS study comparing the data of the last 30 or so years and of right now 1 of 10 people in the UK will get an autoimmune disease at some point in their live such as diabetes, MS, Parkinson,... 30 years ago it was like 1 out of 50. And one common thing in countries with a higher autoimmune disease rate is a lot of corn products, like corn starch, corn sirup,... Right now the final proof is missing cause the studies just started. And maybe it is not corn and something completely different, but the stakes are high it is corn.
I feel like with what you've stated it is far too early to point to corn itself as the cause. Their are so many things that have grown in usage these past 30 years I'm not sure how they could confidently say it is corn itself doing it.
There's also the fact people have been eating corn as a staple for millennia.
Yes and no. Corn is nothing new but the corn we use is kinda new. It is one of the biggest GMO there is. That's a big part in research right now within those studies. And it's not against GMO per se but the changes corn made. Maybe it's really just sugar and fructose semms to be worse as glucose. So yeah, maybe sugar, but right now it seems to be more.
Worth noting US corn is quite different than corn of the past due to selective breeding and such
Like for instance plastics.
Maybe all the shit they spray on the corn to make sure it grows quickly/effectively
I was just thinking about plastics and all of the associated chemicals. And almost everything corn related is packaged in plastic so even if they did link corn, could they really say the plastic does not affect us? Of course not.
Not only could it be almost anything that's increased in our general environment, but better means to identify specific diseases. Diagnostics and knowledge have advanced in the 30 or so years this study apparently covers, and can account for an "increase" in the prevalence of auto-immune diseases.
In theory, there's still some diseases that while well understood, HCPs still take excruciatingly long to diagnose and prefer to explore routes like mental health and exclusionary diagnoses first, which could suggest prevalence is higher still.
Prior to the 1960s, hardly anybody died of cancer.
Because we didn't even know what it was, let alone how to detect it.
This is correlation. Corn (or high fructose corn syrup) is a common ingredient in ultra processed foods, which we already know are the cause of the obesity epidemic. Pre-Colombian societies ate plenty of corn.
Itβs also not just about sugar as some other comments have suggested. Humans are built to eats carbs and some tribal people even today get a huge amount of calories from honey without any obesity.
The problem is the way sugar (and fat and other ingredients) are processed in industrial food production. Studies have shown that if you give people food that contains the exact same proportion of fats and sugars, in whole food and junk food form, people will eat more of the junk food. This is the problem. Whole foods are generally all fine.
It's wild to me how much stuff has corn in it. A few years ago SwiftonSecurity did a big thread on Twitter all about corn and its frightening.
https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2020/02/19/disturbing-corn-fact-everything-is-made-from-corn/
That sounds a lot like correlation not causation. Countries that use a lot of corn syrup also use a lot of every other food industry chemical, and somewhere in that chemical soup could be something real, but it's probably not the corn