I think the bigger issue people have is how much HFCS is put into things, how it’s put into things that don’t really need it (why on Earth would fruit juice need added sweetener?), and how more of it is needed to create a sweetness that overwhelms its uninteresting taste where a small amount of honey or cane sugar would suffice. Generally when you see HFCS in a product, it’s a good signifier that not much thought was put into the quality of the product in general. Sort of like when rock stars put strange demands on their list so they know that the important demands were also met.
Cool! I’ve never seen it in my region (other than agave which I don’t really count), and I’ve always wondered why too. After all, there’s no lacking in artificial maple syrup concoctions.
I prefer things like real honey, real maple syrup, and real unrefined cane sugar to HFCS as a matter of flavor. It’s all sugar, of course. I eat less sugar overall to the extent that I’m a snob about only eating the best sugars.
That one sounded like utter nonsense to me too. I mean if ants got into a bee-hive the ants eating some honey would be the least of the bees worries. (Which would most likely be the ants eating all the young and any bee stupid enough to try and protect the young.)
Yes, I meant the people who rant the loudest. There are some folks who insist that HFCS is significantly worse than other sources of an equivalent amount of sugar, often on grounds that it’s “unnatural”, or not “organic”, or the like. Like I said, any sugar would be bad if you ate that much of it.
Or, rather, golden syrup is made before pure cane sugar.
Golden syrup is sort of an intermediate on the path from cane juice via concentrated cane juice (really, really close to golden syrup) via unrefined cane sugar to “pure”, white, refined cane sugar. And after crystallizing out some of the sugar from the concentrated juice, you get dark syrup, and in the next stage, molasses.
There’s also a distinct flavor difference between unrefined cane sugar (demerara sugar) and the “fake” dark brown sugar which is just refined sugar with some added molasses for taste and color.
IME most people who have a bone to pick with HFCS really do seem to think that HFCS is an ‘industrial chemical’ and uniquely bad for the body because it’s not ‘natural’. They have no issues with eating excessive amounts of honey, cane sugar, maple syrup, seek out many products that contain large amounts of sugar, and tend to get somewhat offended if you tell them that of all sweeteners honey is the most similar to HFCS.
Eating 150g of carbohydrate per day from sweeteners is terrible for your whole body. Whether they come from cane sugar or HFCS matters hardly at all.
AWESOME idea! So we genetically modify flowering plants to emit nutrasweet honeysuckle (or stevia or whatever), so that the resultant honey is calorie free!
It’s been determined here that there is an artificial honey, at least in sweetness and in viscosity, in cooking substitution. But, on a finer level, it seems impossible to synthesize what the busy bee gals do in gathering from fields of flowers. There are honey varietals, just like wine or coffee varietals, that result from the collection from different flowers; here’s a good rundown, along with lots of other honey info on that site. You really can taste the difference in different flower sources. As a horticulturist, that delights me as a nice statement in the diversity of plant chemistry, down to nectar source.
And, those bees do a world of service in pollinating so many agricultural crops we love as fruits, nuts, and ornamentals. Fake honey might be cheaper and as sweet, but it doesn’t support as complex an ecological/agricultural web as the bees do, so, it’s worth it to support beekeepers and real honey.
