Corn (aka Maize, and including Teosinte)

Edition: 2016-12-06

Temporary Note:
This content is now mirrored on Cureality,
due to Wheat Free Forum going off-line for
several days on or about 2016-12-03
For Cureality non-subscribers, the
discussion thread is still open at WFF.

Corn is a high glycemic carb, even as an organic heirloom (ancestral teosinte is over 50% carb by weight). But that's far from the only problem with it.

Carbs

Using Wheat Belly targets, a mere 6 corn chips, one tortilla, is your entire meal/6-hour-interval allotment of net carbs (15 grams). Betcha can't eat just 6.

Protein

Dr. Davis posted expanded remarks on corn at:
WBB: “Grain Bashing: It's easy”.
The zein protein of corn is an analog of the gliadin protein of wheat, and can trigger many of the same problems.

Fat

The fat in corn is from the oil, which is about 50% Omega 6 linoleic acid in whole corn. The ω6:ω3 ratio is about 32:1 in whole corn. These numbers are much more adverse for refined corn oil. Plus, the pittance of ω3 is ALA, and not the desired DHA and EPA. If the subject at hand is corn chips, expect even more industrial seed oils to be present unless there's a Nutrition Facts panel handy that says something else.

Two landmark 1960s trials (SDHS, MCE) used to support the “cholesterol hypothesis”, where saturated fat was replaced by corn oil, were lately discovered to have misrepresented their own data. Lowering cholesterol by increasing corn oil intake actually increased the risk of death.

Folic Acid

This is an issue for corn flours, and as of 2016, now including corn masa flour. The folic acid form of Vitamin B9 is being added to these flours as fortification. This is a non-optimal, if not frankly adverse, form of folate for a significant fraction of the population. This is a matter of methylation status due to epigenetics. If you are an MTHFR mutant, this is yet another reason to avoid corn-based products.

GMO (using the misleading grain industry definition of explicit gene insertion)

Any corn which fails to include a credible claim of “non-GMO” is almost certain to be GMO. A claim of “organic” won't necessarily assure that (except at Whole Foods, in 2018, maybe). My posture on GMO is here.

GMO corn could be herbicide-resistant, insecticide-expressing, or both.

Such food safety testing as has been done on these traits has compared it to “regular” food, and presumably subjects on a typical western diet, complete with high noise from other adverse agents. Until we have results from wheat-free low-carb high-fat populations with known healthy gut flora, we won't have any real idea what the risks actually are. I'm not volunteering for the trials.

Glyphosate-resistant (Roundup-Ready®) corn is likely to have some glyphosate uptake. Applying it to the pre-emergent or growing plant is the whole point of it. At least one researcher has argued that the tight correlation between the rise of glyphosate use and ASD is more than a coincidence.

Bt corn will have Bacillus thuringiensis throughout. Does this screw up gut flora? Again, until we have adequately controlled studies on otherwise grain-free LCHF subjects with known healthy starting gut microbiomes, we won't know. Such a test is impossible to run at present, because we may be a couple of decades from knowing what an optimal human microbiome is.

Bt corn, by the way, is rapidly becoming worthless as a pest management technique, because it has quite predictably given rise to Bt-resistant bugs (Field-evolved resistance by western corn rootworm to multiple Bacillus thuringiensis toxins in transgenic maize). When the dosage is too low to kill all the bugs, it gives reproductive advantage to the survivors, who become the emergent majority. So what will Big Ag™ do about this? Up the dosage?

Glufosinate-resistant corn (Liberty Link) may have uptake of this herbicide. I haven't yet looked into the potential hazards of that.

How about non-GMO?

Is it really?
Imidazoline-resistant corn (Clearfield) was created by chemo-mutagenesis (aka: recklessly random gene insertion). The industry passes it off as “non GMO”, so being in Europe may not protect you on this. Your bag of non-GMO chips will have a mystery genome, which might have inherent risks, and may have uptake of the herbicide imidazoline. I haven't yet looked into the potential hazards of imidazoline either, and given the known issues with corn, why bother.

And that assumes everyone is being honest and competent. When they aren't we get things like the Starlink corn recall. Thought that was history? “In August of 2013, StarLink corn was reported to be found again contaminating some foods in Saudi Arabia.”

Summary

On the whole, corn is worth avoiding entirely in any form from any vintage. Like wheat (“non GMO”, so far), it takes some effort to avoid it, because being yet another pervasive high-yield low-cost commodity with inadequate risks disclosure, corn is an all-too-common contaminant (ingredient) in processed foods.

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Bob Niland [disclosures] [topics]