Are there any cola brands available in the mainland US with cane or beet sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup?
I don’t know about variants of cola, but I’ll nitpick to say that ‘simple sugar’ is possibly a confusing term to refer to ‘cane or beet sugar’, as the sugar made from those plants is sucrose (table sugar,) which is chemically not as simple a molecule as fructose, or glucose, the other form of sugar found in HFCS.
Ok maybe I’m confused then. I’m specifically looking for whatever is the opposite of hfcs… maybe I’m misguided there too. People condemn hfcs and praise Coke from Hawaii made from cane sugar.
Please enlighten me.
Check the kosher for passover aisle at your market.
Mexican Coke made with cane sugar is available at Costco, at least on the West Coast.
I believe Pepsi Throwback is still available, isn’t it?
Isn’t all sugar “simple”? There is no “complex” sugar.
Yes.
I haven’t seen it around here lately, but Jones Soda is made with sugar instead of HFCS. In fact it’s intentionally advertised as such. You might want to check around to see if it is available in your area.
Just find a store that caters to US Mexicans. They’re all over around me, they still carry (glass) bottled coca-cola made with cane sugar.
/Chicagoland
In my area Mexican Coke with cane sugar is also available at Home Depot for a few dollars more per case than Cotsco, if you’re not a member.
There are also a variety of craft/boutique soda companies who make colas without corn syrup. Some grocery stores have them in the natural foods section, but others seem to just put them with the rest of the soft drinks.
TheFreeDictionary has an entry for complex sugars, defined as “sugar molecules that can be hydrolyzed or digested to yield two molecules of the same or different simple sugars, such as sucrose, lactose, and maltose. Also called disaccharide, polysaccharide.”
So cane sugar is mostly complex sugars (sucrose). High fructose corn syrup is pure simple sugar.
And in Texas, almost every store around me has it, including the little shop down the street from me. Also Whole Foods and the like sell cane and beet sugar sodas with wide selection of flavors and brands.
Capt
Thanks all for the replies. I can certainly look at Sam’s or Whole Foods, and we’re getting a Costco this summer (New Orleans). But given that, what are the real differences for health? Assu
Sorry I’m post from my phone and the keyboard keeps crashing.
^assume I drink a liter per day
Huh. Live and learn. So are these polysaccharides considered complex carbohydrates, or am I conflating things?
As far as health goes, you want to keep the intake of added sugars (anything listed as sugar, whether plain sugar or HFCS, on a food label) as low as possible; ideally, the only sugar you get should come from food that naturally has sugar in it (same for fats). As far as your body is concerned, sucrose and HFCS are identical; both have about the same proportion of glucose and fructose and sucrose is readily broken down with little or no additional energy (some studies suggest there could be a difference, and pure fructose by itself is known to cause more adverse health effects, but the difference between HFCS and sucrose is controversial; the rise of the obesity epidemic has more to do with more sugar (and calories in general) being consumed than the kind of sugar).
Incidentally, the Mayo Clinic advises women to consume no more than 100 calories a day from added sugars - or less than ONE can of Coke (140 calories, all from sugars); even men should consume no more than 150 calories a day from added sugars - or just about one can.
Have there been any studies that determine if people can taste the difference between HFCS and sucrose?
At the simplest, you have monosaccharides, simple sugars that are in isolation, then you have disaccharides, two monosaccharides bonded together, which can be called a polysaccharide but that term is usually reserved for starches and cellulose (molecules with 2-10 sugar units are often called oligosaccharides; starch and cellulose mainly differ in the way the simple sugars are bonded together, thus making cellulose indigestible but starches digestible).