You know those ads promoting corn syrup? Well, what DOES the opposition have to say about corn syrup! Maybe I’ve been living under a rock or something, but I’ve never really heard anythign bad about it! So, what’s the cons of corn syrup?
They say it doesn’t taste as good as cane sugar. They point to Coca Cola before and after the New Coke debacle. (Stores around here sell Mexican Coke at a huge mark-up.) They say manufacturers use corn syrup to shave a few cents per unit off of sweets, and they don’t pass the savings on to us consumers.
Is there anything else about corn syrup, like some bad health effects?
No more than sugar, but as the ad says, it is OK in moderation. And therein lies the problem, as HFCS is in damn near everything, even things you do not associate with a sweetener, like salad dressing and barbecue sauce. So it takes a a lot of label reading to be sure you are using it in moderation.
Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, talks about HFCS in terms of a cheap ingredient that made it possible for a 20-oz. bottle of soda to cost the same as the petite little 8 oz. bottles of sugar-sweetened Coca-Cola that many of us grew up with. The smallest size soda at a fast food restaurant today is way more than 8 oz. – and who orders a “small”? Thus, HFCS has become associated with obesity, diabetes, etc.
As** Fear Itself **says, it’s OK in moderation. But when an 8-oz. serving of soda is moderate, and HFCS is in many other foods, it gets tricky.
Thisarticle gives a pretty good (if rather long) overview of the subject. Basically there is no “smoking gun” as far as health risks are concerned (at least over receiving an equivalent number of calories from sugar). But there are some studies that show there are health risk associated with it.
High fructose corn syrup is higher in fructose than table sugar (both are disaccharides, which means they contain both glucose and fructose molecules). This is the reason for the different taste.
Fructose must be processed through your liver, unlike glucose, and therefore has some health effects. Some scientists are implicating it as an agent that contributes to fat gain and metabolic syndrome. Watch ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’ on youtube for a loooong explanation by a well-known pediatric endocrinologist.
However most people who are scared of HFCS seem unaware of all this and are against it because it is processed, so cheap, and added to everything these days.
Eat a balanced diet… variety of foods… moderation… watch caloric intake… blah blah blah… and it isn’t so bad.
A diet in heavy in pre-packaged food is likely to have lots of HFCS. Even bread… even whole-grain wheat bread in many (not all) varieties has it
Keep reading labels… you’ll get tired of seeing HFCS as a primary ingredient.
It isn’t much higher. HFCS is typically 60% fructose, and sucrose is 50%. There is a 90% fructose, but that generally isn’t used directly. Chemically, the only difference between HFCS and sucrose is a molecule of water and a slight excess of fructose. There might be a higher absorption rate for HFCS.
It’s true that fructose and glucose behave differently in the body, and glucose is easier for your body to deal with.
However, both HFCS and table sugar contain both fructose and glucose in very close proportions: table sugar is 50/50, and HFCS is usually 55% fructose and 45% glucose. If the choice is whether to consume table sugar or an equivalent amount of HFCS, there is negligible difference. A problem is that people consume so much more nowadays - it’s not a question of which you consume, it’s how much.
I can’t tell the difference between HFCS and sucrose Coke. I’d be interested to see how people fared in a blind taste test.
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t fructose the sugar found in fruits (hence the name)?
If so, then eating fruits is a liver intensive act?
Last year, tests revealed mercury contamination in half of tested samples of high fructose corn syrup. Mercury can be (but isn’t always) used in producing HFCS. Given the ubiquity of HFCS, it might be a significant source of mercury for kids.
It’s not just “corn syrup”–it’s High Fructose Corn Syrup.
You can’t make a pecan pie without corn syrup. You can buy the stuff in any grocery store.
But–just where can you buy High Fructose Corn Syrup?
As an aside here, do all of the folks who complain that HFCS “is in damn near everything” ever consider that most of those products used to contain regular sugar?
If you look at regular home recipes for barbecue sauces, salad dressings, marinades, baked beans, they contain sugar. It’s nothing that commercial food processors are “hiding.” People run around in circles yelling “My gosh, there’s HFCS in ketchup!” but as far as I know there has been sugar or corn syrup in ketchup forever.
Notice, they didn’t test the HFCS, they tested the products that contained HFCS. It is certainly plausible that the mercury comes from HFCS, but IFRC, that study was finding ppt levels of mercury. That is such a small amount of mercury that contamination can easily come from unexpected sources. I’d be interested in how this compares with the quantity of mercury found in foods that don’t have HFCS.
I had not heard about that before, but from poking around just now, it appears that the levels of mercury were detectable, but not necessarily a risk, and that the levels found in HFCS were way below what’s found in other common food items. If my impression is incorrect I’d appreciate being set straight.
You can make pecan pie with (sugar) cane syrup. But it’s not as easy to find as corn syrup. It was readily available in Louisiana when I lived there, but I don’t see it on the shelves in Tennessee where I live now.
There’s a correlation (which is not a causal relationship) between increasing levels of obesity in the US and increasing consumption of HFCS.
There’s a theory that the low cost of HFCS encourages overconsumption of sweetened products.
There’s also a theory that, if you get used to eating, say, bread with HFCS, you’ll get used to your bread being sweet and bread without sweetener won’t taste as good as it once did. Sweetened products probably have more calories than unsweetened (unless they use an artificial sweetener), so that change might lead to you consuming more calories while eating the same amount of food. That’s not something most Americans need or want.
There are also people who think that HFCS is a scary unnatural chemical and therefore bad.
There are homemade bread recipes that don’t contain sugar, and there are commercially baked breads that contain HFCS.
I agree completely AnneNeville. HFCS is cheap sugar and has contributed to obesity, but I think there is nothing specifically bad about HFCS except that people are eating more calories. I also think that the environmental cost of importing cane sugar is high since it generally needs to be shipped in from the tropics.