High Fructose Corn Syrup

I see lots of hysteria about this product, but for some reason, most people appear to miss the big picture.

But before I get into that, we have to know what High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS as it is commonly called, actually is.

Corn is a wonderful little grain grown all over the world, but thanks to the Government funding scheme, it is produced in huge quantities in the USA.

Like most grains, the energy in corn is predominantly stored as a carbohydrate, a long chain polysaccharide commonly known as starch, predominantly amylopectin, a complex chain of glucose molecules that is similar to glycogen found in humans.

The manufacturers of HFCS take this starch, and enzymatically break down the starch into smaller pieces, and ultimately creates a glucose syrup. From here, they enzymatically convert the glucose to fructose, and through a series of other processing steps, produce a syrup that contains around 90% glucose. This 90% Fructose/10% glucose syrup can be used as is, or as is more common for food uses, the Fructose syrup is mixed with a glucose syrup to create a 55:45 fructose/glucose syrup, or HFCS 55.

This reduction in fructose content makes the end product extremely similar to the more common sugar used in the remainder of the world, sucrose. Sucrose is 50:50 glucose to fructose.

If you spend some time examining the research that compares sucrose with HFCS 55, you will find there is no real difference in the metabolic effect that both of these common sugars have on the body.

So why, you may ask, does HFCS get a bad name. Well, predominantly HFCS is an American phenomenon. Its used in any product that would normally use sucrose as a sweetner. The ubiquitous source of HFCS in USA and Canada is Soda. Soda used to be sweetened with Sucrose, and still is all over the world, but now (in USA and Canada) HFCS 55. They use HFCS because its cheap, its liquid, and its cheap. When you make as much Sugar laced Soda as Coke does, you want to make it as cheaply as possible, so you can make as much money as possible.

Over the past few decades, HFCS consumption has taken off, pretty much matched by a relative decrease in sucrose based sweetner consumption. But not completely matched. So ultimately, overall sugar intake has increased. Is this increase because of HFCS, or because people are eating more processed foods, and drinking more soda...

HFCS is bad, for the same reasons Sucrose is bad. It can provide a dose of fructose that far exceeds what you could consume unless you like eating bags of apples in a single sitting. Fructose is bad because it does not provide a natural appetite feedback, enabling excessive consumption to continue at will. It is also metabolised differently, and may result in excessive fat production, a reduction in insulin sensitivity and increased blood lipids, as well as a host of other potential bad things.

But these are not special to HFCS, they are available to anything that enables consumption of high levels of fructose. Which gets me to the confusing thing. People are replacing these sweetners with Raw sugars, and other products like Blue Avgave Syrup, that are supposedly 'healthy' while HFCS is evil.

Sure Blue Avgave syrup is low GI and quite sweet, so it should be, fructose is low GI and highly sweet... and blue avgave is a great source of fructose.

So, if HFCS is bad because it provides 55% fructose, and Blue Avgave and normal sugar are good, while they also provide fructose, whats the deal.

Its because one thing is natural, and HFCS is not. Somehow they think that the addition of a few vitamins, minerals or 'naturally produced' is going to magically stop the effects of fructose can have on the body. Either that or they are genuinely naive and somehow think natural things are good. If so I have some naturally produced Hydrogen Sulphide from Rotorua they can inhale for 1/2 an hour.

Intake of Sucrose, Fructose, HFCS, Blue Avgave etc will produce a similar negative effect on your body. Avoiding a product because it has HFCS in it, but then consuming the same product with sucrose in it is missing the point, or the big picture.

Its not a natural/artifical thing, its a fructose thing.