Side note: "in to" should be one word - "into".
The corn syrup based foods are cheap, tasty, and really easy to eat. It's too bad they have no nutrients besides calories.
The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.
No, corn syrup is used in food and drinks all over the world.
Personally, I have nothing against corn syrup so long as the sweetness actually tastes nice and appropriate for what I'm consuming.
Corn syrup is also a lot better than artificial sweeteners which all taste like hot garbage and make me literally ill.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/495946/consumption-share...
...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.The problem is that US government subsidies for corn and soy have created an entire class of products that are cheaper than any alternatives.
If we removed those subsidies, there would be far less incentive for companies to use them.