Wednesday, March 4, 2009

I found you a new job

You can tell what's up with the economy by the spam received by email. 3 years ago, it was all cheap drugs, fake online degrees, and body part modification - bigger, smaller, harder, softer, depending on the part. Now the drugs have dropped to maybe 5% of the total and job search or home loan titles dominate more than half the spam I get. There are still some online degree ads, but those now seem relevant to how to get a new job and seem more real, like "get certified from home in medical records keeping."

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In other commercial offerings, I take exception to the "High Fructose Corn Syrup is just corn and not bad for you" commercials. HFCS is fine in moderation, they say. What they don't say is that it's almost impossible to restrict HFCS to anything approaching moderation in a modern American diet without taking draconian measures.
  • For breakfast, your store bought orange juice, toast, peanut butter, jelly, AND cereal can all have HFCS if you don't take measures to prevent it. That's not moderation.
  • For lunch, your soda either has semi-poisonous sweetners in it or HFCS. A hamburger bun will have HFCS as will your ketchup. Maybe even your fries. Or, if you have a ham sandwich, your bread, mayo and ham may all have it. If you get a salad, your commercial salad dressing will almost certainly have HFCS. As will some yogurt. That's not moderation.
  • At dinner... I think you get the idea. Also, any dessert you have is more likely than not to have HFCS.
When 80% of the foods you eat during the day contain HFCS, unless you take special steps to prevent it, it's not moderation. And THAT is what people are saying about it - it's well nigh inescapable. Unless you buy the more expensive foods, which the people they're aiming that commercial at are least likely to be able to do. I live by myself so I can "afford" to spend $5 on jam with no HFCS instead of $1.80 on the HFCS stuff twice its size.

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While I'm ranting, please ladies, if you can't move your upper lip due to implants or Botox or whathaveyou, you look sick and ill, not voluputous and sexy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Judging by the subject lines in the spamblocker digest, the spam filtered out where I work is about 25% body part modification, 10% gambling related, and about 65% is in German and I have no clue what they're pitching. What makes this really interesting is that my employer has zero presence in German-speaking countries.