It provides calories but no nutrition. That’s something that you should be trying to eat less, not more, of. Replacing the HFCS in your diet with sugar or honey or organic agave nectar isn’t going to do a whole lot of good, though. Most doctors and nutritionists would say you should be trying to cut down on all of those things, not just HFCS.
Cheap food isn’t an unmixed blessing, either. It can lead to larger portions at restaurants and in packages. There’s research showing that people eat more at a sitting when larger portions are served.
“While the glucose and fructose, which are the two components of HFCS, are monosaccharides, sucrose is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose linked together with a relatively weak glycosidic bond…Sucrose is broken down during digestion into fructose and glucose through hydrolysis by the enzyme sucrase, by which the body regulates the rate of sucrose breakdown. Without this regulation mechanism, the body has less control over the rate of sugar absorption into the bloodstream.”
It isnt in the stuff that traditionally had sugar init, it is in EVERYTHING else…
if you look at old bread recipes, 1800 s and earlier, there was no sugar added, most recipes called for making a slurry of water and flour to catch yeast, then adding flour to it and maybe an oil before kneading. Then in the early part of the century when commercial baking yeast became popular, you added a tsp of sugar to warm water to proof the yeast [demonstrate the yeast beasties were actually aliive before adding the flour] now almost all commercial breads have HFCS added to it. Honestly, I dont add any sugar, I just put flour yeast water and a dab of salt in a bowl and turn it into bread dough. HFCS is sprayed on breads to augment the top browning, on french fries and tater tots to boost the browning.
Look at salad dressing, I NEVER added sugar to a vinaigrette, it is herbs, oil and vinegar…commercial has HFCS.
Chicken freaking noodle soup does NOT NEED SUGAR - so why is HFCS in that can of soup?
it gets put into everything … especially if there has been a reduction in fat …
Why do you think mrAru and I cook everything pretty much from scratch? It triggers migraines in me, and as a type 2 diabetic, can slowly poison me by thrashing my metaboliic processes.
If home cooks can’t buy it, all food with HFCS will be processed food.
Processed food also tends to be high in sodium. There’s probably a pretty good correlation between eating a lot of HFCS and eating a lot of sodium, even if HFCS itself does not contain sodium. Cutting the number of processed foods (including foods with HFCS) that you eat is a good way to cut down your sodium intake.
I make no-knead bread. There’s no sugar in it, except for any that is in the tablespoon of vinegar that goes into each loaf. I use rapid-rise yeast, so I don’t need to proof it.
One factor about HFCS versus sugar debate is that often lost is that sugar is expensive primarily because of the high import tariffs the US government puts on sugar and the subsidies it puts on corn production. Why does Mexican Coke have sugar instead of HFCS? Because at free market prices, sugar is competitive with HFCS. It’s the market distortions our government has put in place (with heavy pushing from the agriculture lobby) that puts HFCS in everything instead of sugar.
Thos people who think HFCS is a heavily processed substance do not know much about how sugar is refined. Even sugar is a heavily processed chemical.
True. I’m an 18th Century reenactor and I know that back in the days when sugar was very expensive and hard to come by it wasn’t used nearly as much as it is today.
But just because one can make bread without a sweetener doesn’t mean that everyone always has. In my area, with it’s very large Portuguese population, Portuguese Sweet Bread, made with eggs and sugar, is an old tradition. A couple of days ago, there was a bit of a disscussion in the Cafe about sugar in corn bread. The traditional New England brown bread, often served with baked beans, has always contained molasses.
People like sweet stuff. They buy sweet stuff. And food processors are giving them that.
The presence of HFCS, or sugar or any caloric sweetener, in food does not cause obesity. People consuming too many calories does.
How does the cost of sugar from sugar beets, cane sugar, and HFCS compare?
Per the USDA:
US wholesale refined beet sugar - 45¢/lb Dec 2009
US price HFCS Midwest market - 26¢/lb dry wait Dec 2009
US retail refined sugar- 58¢/lb - Sep 2009. (doesn’t specify cane or sugar beet)
World refined sugar price - 30¢/lb - Dec 2009 (doesn’t specify cane or sugar beet. Doesn’t specify wholesale or retail)
This is also an interesting table from the USDA showing US per capita sweetner intake since 1966, split out by sweetner type. The short answer is:
1966 - 97.3 lbs sugar, 0.0 lbs HFCS out of a total of 123.3 lbs
2008 - 65.8 lbs sugar, 53.2 lbs HFCS out of a total of 170.5 lbs
The good news is it looks like annual intake peaked in 1999 at 181.6lbs/person and has been dropping since.
It looks like there is a whole bunch more pricing and use data here, but it’s in a WK1 format and I can’t access that right now.
I was talking about environmental costs, not economic costs. Mostly, it is the carbon footprint of shipping it from far away that I am concerned about. I do not know for certain, but it is my assumption that the carbon footprint for cane sugar is pretty high compared to corn syrup. Beet sugar has the advantage of being local, but how does the processing cost compare?
I don’t actually know these numbers. Intuitively, I think that the environmental cost is lowest for corn syrup.
How do you define “nutrition”? Calories are a component of the “nutrition” umbrella term I would think.
I don’t think it would do any good. If HFCS doesn’t qualify as “nutrition” by whatever definition you’re using, then sugar wouldn’t either.
That’s just wrong. The two monosaccharides in table sugar are held together with a weak bond, which is the first thing that gets broken in your digestive system. Table sugar gets absorbed somewhat more slowly, but I don’t think there’s a big difference.
Particularly true since the first thing your body does is break the glycoside bond to get fructose and glucose. In fact, the bond is so weak, that the acid in Coke can cause it to hydrolyze. I’d be interested in finding out how long sucrose is actually present in a can of cane sugar Coke.
Also, there are plenty of natural sweeteners that have similar ratios of glucose to fructose. Honey has about 38% fructose and 31% glucose. So, if you define HFCS as a simple 60:40 mixture of fructose and glucose, then honey is about 70% HFCS.
I should also point out this in an American thing. Bread in the UK has far less sugar/corn-syprup added. Even recipes for homemade bread in the US tell you to add a ton of sugar, whereas British ones do not.
Those are two really different styles of bread. Most bread recipes I have seen in the US call for sugar only in small amounts and used for blooming the yeast.
Regarding making bread: my bread machine recipes all call for sugar (or honey), usually about a tablespoon. Even using quick rise yeast, my understanding is that yeast feeds on sugar, and therefore, a bit of sweetener is required to make the yeast make the bread rise.
Thats what I thought when I got mine. But either British yeast is a different species that doesn’t require sugar, or there is enough sugar in the other ingredients to feed the yeast, and the sugar is only there to make the bread taste sweet.
False. Check out the no-knead bread recipe in the link in my last post. There’s no sugar in that, but it rises. I have empirically confirmed this many times.
I use Red Star rapid-rise yeast. AFAIK, it doesn’t come from Europe.
You can successfully make bread with water, yeast, wheat flour and salt. It will rise.
A lot of recipes have a small amount of sugar to help the yeast rise faster. I quick scan of places like food tv have about 2 to 3 table spoons of sugar/honey for about 7 cups of flour. None have as much as the 1/2 cup sugar linked above.
You start the no-knead bread the night before you want to have it. Since it sits for so long, the yeast taking a while to rise without sugar isn’t an issue.
I did, and screw that. 12-18 hours to make bread? Man, I already have a job. I think I’ll stick to my fresh-homemade-bread-in-45-minutes machine, thankyouverymuch. ('Cause… I still don’t have to knead. Pour the ingredients in, flip the switch, walk away. Come back less than an hour later and eat bread. Mmmm. Warm bread. :: drool :: )
I don’t mind a tablespoon of honey here and there.
I think I’ll stick to my fresh-homemade-bread-in-45-minutes machine, thankyouverymuch. ('Cause… I still don’t have to knead. Pour the ingredients in, flip the switch, walk away. Come back less than an hour later and eat bread. Mmmm. Warm bread. :: drool :: )