Bottled-up rage: This is what Trump derangement syndrome looks like

Only Donald Trump could make the legacy corporate media defend corn syrup.

Last week, the president announced that Coca-Cola would begin directly offering Americans a new choice: Coca-Cola sweetened with cane sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup. Coca-Cola confirmed the news this week.

Instead of being honest, NBC News essentially ran defense for corn syrup — because Trump criticized it.

It’s another victory for the Make America Healthy Again movement. But reaction to the announcement was as predictable as it was absurd.

Within hours of Trump’s announcement, NBC News published a story — citing medical “experts,” of course — questioning whether cane sugar is better than corn syrup. “As Trump pushes for cane sugar in Coca-Cola, is it really better than corn syrup?” the headline asked.

Its conclusion: not really. It’s “essentially the same.” Nothing to see here.

But there is something to see here — quite a bit, in fact.

NBC News’ reaction is yet another example of how Trump’s critics, sick with Trump derangement syndrome, reflexively oppose anything he does, taking the losing side of an 80/20 issue. Protecting your children from radical trans ideology? Bigotry. Border security? That’s racist. Want real sugar in your soda instead of a processed, factory-engineered syrup made from crops sprayed with dangerous chemicals? Nope, can’t support that.

You don’t need a doctorate in nutrition or to be a medical doctor to know that HFCS is bad for you. It has long been associated with poor health outcomes like obesity, insulin resistance, and other metabolic diseases. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, and it’s a product of a food system that routinely puts profits over Americans’ health.

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  Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images

It’s no coincidence that poor health outcomes exploded when American food manufacturers began using processed, factory-engineered products like corn syrup and seed oils. Moreover, we intuitively know that natural food products — like cane sugar — are better for our health than cheaper, processed alternatives.

And yet, NBC News is on a campaign to debunk this widely acknowledged fact. It’s a move straight from the legacy media’s anti-Trump playbook.

NBC News cited Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, who said cane sugar and HFCS have “identical metabolic effects” because “high-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar are about 50% fructose, 50% glucose.”

That might be true in biochemistry textbooks. But real-world nutrition is not only about molecules. It’s about systems, and our reliance on HFCS is evidence that our food system is deeply broken.

Food manufacturers use HFCS because it’s cheaper, not because it’s healthy. It became dominant in the 1970s and 1980s through agricultural subsidies, corporate lobbying, and a food industry obsessed with maximizing profit margins. It’s addictive and engineered for invisibility. It normalizes excess consumption, and it’s seemingly in everything: soda, candy, bread, condiments, salad dressings, and snack foods, including many foods you don’t realize are sweetened unless you look at the nutritional label.

If the food or drink product you purchase is found in the middle of the grocery store, chances are it contains HFCS or some other manufactured derivative with a different name.

Cane sugar, on the other hand, is less processed, less ubiquitous, and more easily avoided. Plus, it comes from nature. We intuitively know which is better to eat.