If there was one single thing you could do to improve your health, it would be this: stop eating foods and drinks that contain high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Americans have gone from an average of twenty teaspoons full of sugar per year to approximately one-hundred and fifty pounds per year per person. That’s an average of half a pound of sugar for every person in the United States every day, including children. Most of this sugar comes in the form of HFCS, a substance that is less expensive than regular sugar and much sweeter.

An ancient physician said, “The dose makes the poison.” This means that a harmless substance can become poison, or toxic, if too much is eaten. In our grocery stores today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a processed food or sweetened beverage that did not contain HFCS. A 20-ounce soda, for example, contains 15 teaspoons of sugar in the form of HFCS. Americans are consuming HFCS in toxic levels.

Even if the quantities consumed weren’t toxic, HFCS by itself isn’t healthy. To make HFCS, glucose and fructose are separated. Separated fructose goes straight to the liver and creates a fat producing factory. This fat production, lipogenesis, leads to fatty liver, a disease affecting over 90 million Americans. Fatty liver leads to type-2 diabetes which leads to other serious ailments, such as heart disease, strokes, cancer, and dementia.

HFCS also contains many chemicals, some of which are used during manufacturing and are contaminants. Chloralkali is a chemical used when making HFCS. It contains mercury in trace amounts. If eaten rarely, trace amounts of mercury wouldn’t be a problem. Most people, however, consume an average of twenty teaspoons of HFCS a day and teenagers, on average, add fourteen more teaspoons per day. Given those quantities, a heavy metal like mercury can accumulate in the body and cause many health problems.

Purging your home of products that contain high-fructose corn syrup and replacing them with healthy alternatives is one giant step towards improving your health and the health of your family.

Read the full article here: Why You Should Never Eat High Fructose Corn Syrup