5 Myths About Sweet Corn Busted - Are They Really Healthy?

Sweet corn is one in every of summer’s simplest, purest pleasures. A fresh-picked ear, grilled to caramelized perfection and gently buttered, offers unbelievable, advanced sweetness, associate intoxicating texture and lots of nutrition edges besides.

But many folks have convinced themselves that sweet corn is unhealthy. That’s a shame. It’s straightforward to require a couple of real nuggets of reality and use them to return to a distorted conclusion concerning this super-delicious summer green groceries.

Here are some of the most important myths of sweet corn: 

Myth: Corn has no health benefits

Truth: Sweet corn is filled with lutein and zeaxanthin, two phytochemicals that promote healthy vision. A midsize ear conjointly offers a useful 3-gram dose of dietary fiber.  

Myth:Most sweet corn is genetically changed.

Truth: Most people believe that sweet corn genetically modified. Whereas most maize is genetically changed, most sweet corn isn't. 

Myth: Corn causes fatness

Truth: Associate ear of corn has concerning a similar range of calories as associate apple and fewer than common fraction the sugar. In alternative words, it are often one in every of the healthier foods at the cookout! 

Myth: Cooking makes it less nutritious.

Truth: antioxidant activity, that helps shield the body from cancer and cardiovascular disease, is truly multiplied once corn is cooked. 

Myth: Choose best corn by color of the kernels

Truth: Every corn lover has their favorite varieties. But study says that variety is not much important as freshness. Any corn of any color kernel can be ruined if it’s old. So color can’t be a key to choose quality. The thing to consider is avoid corn with dry, pale husks and silks. If pricked, kernels should squirt whitish juice. Don’t buy a cob that’s more than 24 hours out of the field.

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Let them eat corn

The gloomy gus of economics, the Rev. Thomas Malthus, was the guy who put the dismal into the “dismal science,” predicting that the market in homo sapiens would periodically seek equilibrium through famine and widespread mayhem. Malthus didn’t foresee that humankind could innovate its way out of the 19th-century numbers game: more people+limited arable land=hunger and death. Our preindustrial ancestors eventually came up with a new food formula: more people+better agricultural technology=good eatin’.

It would seem, however, that Malthus may have the last laugh (mirthless and sinister though it might be). Food riots in Haiti and Africa, rice shortages in Asia, Sam’s Club quotas in America, and anxiety-inducing U.N. and World Bank pronouncements highlight an astonishing early 21st century extreme Malthusian makeover. Food prices are escalating beyond the pocketbooks of the poor, and spot shortages even in the industrialized world indicate a breakdown in the developed world’s capacity to maintain adequate food supplies. The World Food Program currently monitors a food crisis watch list of 30 nations and is seeking billions more from donors just to get through anticipated food crises this year.

Broadly speaking the price of wheat has doubled in less than a year, while other staples—corn, maize, and soy—trade well above 1990s levels. According to Catholic Relief Services (CRS), a 110-pound sack of wheat that cost about $8 two years ago in Egypt now costs $25. Rice, the staple food for about 3 billion people worldwide, has tripled in cost in the last 18 months. Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw, a CRS food policy analyst, says the world’s most vulnerable people are now making choices not only between food and fuel but between food and shelter. Poor families are going homeless in order to eat.

A number of large-scale structural and cultural changes have converged to stir up 2008’s food fight. World demand for basic commodities has skyrocketed as families in fast-emerging economies like China convert to a Westernized diet centered around grain-fed meat products. High oil prices drove up transport costs for food and commodities and spurred an abrupt lurch into alternative biofuels. About 30 percent of U.S. corn production in 2008 will be used for ethanol, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. The coup de grace, perhaps permanently, on affordable food has been climate change. Drought in big agricultural nations such as Australia means diminished global rice supplies and increased costs on existing reserves.

Though the poor in developing economies, who traditionally commit the greatest percentage of their daily income to their daily bread, are already the casualties of the global food crunch, Kuennen-Asfaw is certain that rising costs have similarly hurt low-income people in the industrialized world. This slow-boil crisis may have so far gone less observed since folks in the West have a lot farther to fall, she says, even as most of us may be wondering why our wallets and cupboards are going bare earlier in the month than usual.

How best to respond? A real growth sector in terms of global food supply could actually be located in the epicenter of the crisis. Kuennen-Asfaw says 2008’s “sudden” food crisis is actually the result of years of underinvestment in agriculture in the developing world. While the developed world responds to the current food emergency, it must make a deeper commitment to a long-term solution that includes rebuilding capacity in the developing world and an immediate reappraisal of the West’s biofuels strategy.

Corn on the cob

Corn on the cob (known regionally as "pole corn", "cornstick", "sweet pole", "butter-pop" or "long maize") is a culinary term used for a cooked ear of freshly picked maize from a cultivar of sweet corn. Sweet corn is the only variety of maize eaten directly off the cob. The ear is picked while the endosperm is in the "milk stage" so that the kernels are still tender. Ears of corn are steamed or boiled, usually without their green husks, or roasted with them. The husk leaves are in any case removed before serving.

Corn on the cob is normally eaten while still warm. It is boiled or grilled. It is then often seasoned with salt and buttered before serving. Some diners use specialized skewers, thrust into the ends of the cob, to hold the ear while eating without touching the hot and sticky kernels.

Blue Grosbeak

Blue Grosbeak (Passerina caerulea, formerly Guiraca caerulea), is a medium-sized seed-eating bird in the same family as the Northern Cardinal, "tropical" or New World buntings, and "cardinal-grosbeaks" or New World grosbeaks.

The Blue Grosbeak is a migratory bird, with nesting grounds across most of the southern half of the United States and much of northern Mexico, migrating south to Central America and in very small numbers to northern South America; the southernmost record comes from eastern Ecuador. It eats mostly insects, but it will also eat snails, spiders, seeds, grains, and wild fruits. The Blue Grosbeak forages on the ground and in shrubs and trees.