It's not that my diet is great to begin with, but I see now that I severely overestimated the diversity of that which I consume. Having recently begun a personal campaign to eliminate high fructose corn syrup from my diet, I assumed that going one day without anything corn-related would not be all that difficult, and that it would require only marginally more discipline than I have exhibited in the past. Clearly, I was wrong.
Starting with the most important meal of the day, I was dismayed when I took out my frosted Cheerios from the pantry, only to find that my delectable cereal contained Corn Meal, Corn Starch, and Corn Syrup. That, thought I, is a lot of corn. Looking further down the list of ingredients I spied Vanillin, yet another item on the prohibited corn allergen list. So, in the spirit of the 24 corn avoidance challenge, I turned instead to Red Raspberry yogurt. A quick examination of the ingredients revealed that this yogurt also contained Corn Starch, rendering it off limits. So too was the winning combination of bread with creamy brie cheese, as the bread that I had purchased that morning from Giant contained high fructose corn syrup (a follow up visit to the grocery store led to the discovery of bread without HFCS, but the damage had already been done). Hungry and perplexed, I was even unable to find nourishment in the morning hours in Ocean Spray White Cranberry Peach juice, a much loved concoction that contains sodium citrate. Lunch was no better. My intended side of potato chips contained malic acid. Fortunately, at dinner I was saved through the grace of a salmon fillet, though in truth I neglected to check if it was farm raised.
By the end of the day I was unsuccessful in eliminating anything containing corn from my diet even for one day. Because it is used to create so many ingredients, it appears that avoiding anything corn related is next to impossible. I was amazed by the sheer range of ingredients that were made from corn, and I regrettably would be at a loss to attempt to engineer and abide by a diet that sought to avoid it in any form.
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