Beyond The Hive: If it looks like propaganda about high fructose corn syrup, and smells like propaganda ...

The Corn Refiners Association has put out a series of graphs that show how certain (unnamed) products dropped in sales after high fructose corn syrup was removed as an ingredient. There's so much wrong with these charts, which the ill-educated could take as gospel. First, they might have substituted the wrong sweetener, artificial or othewise, to take the place of HFCS. More important, it's hard to think of products that did not experience declines in sales over the last couple of years during the recession. Finally, we don't know what other factors might have contributed to the decline, such as recalls, rises in prices that turned off consumers, poor distribution, or maybe the TV commercials sucked.