Over time, we selectively bred and engineered corn to give us massive ears of corn. The seeds cling so tightly to the cob modern corn can’t exist on its own in the wild.
In the Americas, the transition from hunter-gatherers to maize cultivators resulted in a
5X increase in caries.
And while a modern ear of corn is quite unnatural itself, it’s not even close to the other versions of corn that make up so much of our diets.
Today most of us eat the version after it's steeped, refined, and further processed to yield HFCS.
Corn is a good example of what we tend to do with many plant-based foods...
In the wild the "edible" plant part is scarce, small, and low in sugar/carbs. It would be difficult to eat in large quantities.
But we selectively breed, genetically modify, and change these natural plants into unnatural variations for bigger versions, sweeter versions, higher yield versions. We then take it a step further...
We process and refine them. We squeeze the germ of corn and get oil that we use to fry our food in. We hydrogenate it to make margarine. Cereals, snack foods, salad dressings, soft drink sweeteners, gum, peanut butter, and flour products.
Not only does it hide in our food, but in our food's food.
About 40% of corn in America is used to make biofuels. But only the starch converts to ethanol. The leftovers are cheap feed for pigs and chickens. It's a diet high in PUFAs (polyunsaturated fatty acids like omega-6s). Unlike ruminants (cattle) that can saturate dietary PUFAs, monogastrics (pig and chickens) can't. The high PUFA from their corn-heavy diets get stored in their fat, which gets passed into our fat. This results in soft bacon and can be a contributor to soft
bellies.
