High-Fructose Corn Syrup: the Devil's Sweetener

[drscott]

I rant a lot about this topic. To buy farm votes, Congress not only subsidizes ethanol (made from corn) for gasohol -- at a cost in energy and soil damage higher than the energy content of the resulting ethanol -- but Congress blocks import of sugar to make certain sugar farmers rich. In turn, the price umbrella created a huge market for High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a sweetening additive which in the last few decades has been used as a substitute for sugar in most processed foods, from soft drinks to supposedly healthy yogurts to baked goods and jams.

Here's the recent paper which suggests a direct link. Here's a news article on the recent research showing a doubling of diabetes risk in women who drink at least one soft drink a day.

If you want a single group to blame for American obesity, blame Congress.

If you want to lose weight, seek out whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and drink either water or diet sodas. Fruit juices in moderation are okay, but beware: most of what is sold as fruit juice has added HFCS. Read labels very closely.

Comments

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

The odd thing to me here is that the taste of foods sweetened with corn syrup is so much worse than the taste of the foods sweetened with cane sugar. I've got a science-guy friend who insists adamantly that you can't possibly taste the difference (and he has SCIENCE to PROVE it!), but that's absolute nonsense.

I used to love colas, and Coke in particular. It was a drug of a vice, although I was pretty good about rationing it. Then I just stopped liking it. Well, not quite, First there came a period where I kept thinking that I had gotten diet soda by accident (I have always despised the taste of artificial sweeteners), and then eventually I concluded that I had just grown up or something. But no, it turns out that my turning away from soft drinks came about when they replaced cane sugar with corn sweeteners. When I realized that, I started to keep my eye out for ingredients lists. No surprises at all about what I liked and what I didn't. (The same icky taste issue holds with chocolate syrup -- pick up some chocolate syrup at a health food store, where you can get cane-suger brands, and compare it even to the top-quality stuff available at supermarkets, where nearly all of it is sweetened with cane sugar. There's what feels like a chemical taste to the supermarket stuff, although it's not as if corn sweetener is somehow unnatural.)

Recently the Whole Foods chain has switched to cane sugar in their sodas. I bought some and immediately remembered what soda used to taste like.

No doubt there are dietary health issues with cane sugar as well, but I am wholly convinced that part of the issue here is a desensitized palate one. Didn't the country notice the change in taste?

For me the switch to corn sweeteners helped break me of the soft drink habit for reasons of taste alone.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was very noticeable. When Coke was an elixir you got at the drugstore from a soda jerk, it was served in small, very sweet quantities, complete with cherry syrup or other mixins. It was no threat to anyone's diet because you didn't drink liters of it a day. Now you can rot your teeth and get fat on Big Gulps that don't taste anything like as good; not an improvement. Another example of trading quantity for aesthetic satisfaction, to the detriment of your health.

As for artificial sweeteners, sucralose aka "Splenda" is pretty decent.