Corn Syrup and Sugar filled with GMOs

The backlash

Es refresco. Image Credit: Jo Naylor.

As early as the mid-1990s, I recall friends insisting the Coca-Cola from Mexico (which allegedly was still sweetened with sugar) tasted better than the U.S. version, and going significantly out of their way to purchase the Mexicoke. Such preferences were not lost on soda makers. Pepsi now offers a product called “Pepsi Throwback” – a cola sweetened with good old-fashioned sucrose, just like mom used to make.

But taste isn’t the only issue. Concerns have been raised that HFCS might be worse for human health (and weight) than sucrose. High fructose corn syrup’s image problems have gotten sufficiently dire that the Corn Refiners Association recently petitioned to have the product re-christened as “corn sugar”. The FDA shot down the idea, to the delight of HFCS critics but also the sugar industry, citing that “sugar” is a dried, crystallized substance while HFCS only exists as a liquid. They also pointed out that the name “corn sugar” was already being used to describe an all-glucose corn sweetener. Oops.

Is HFCS sweeter than sucrose?

This question is harder to answer than you’d think. Some researchers state that HFCS is sweeter than sugar, and that this super-sweetness may entice consumers to drink even more HFCS-sweetened beverages. Others (some of them with HFCS industry affiliations) argue that this is a misconception and that there is no meaningful difference between the two products.

At least everyone does seem to agree that fructose tastes sweeter than glucose, so let’s start from there. In terms of sweetness, fructose > glucose.

Fine. And what about sucrose? Well, since it’s a disaccharide composed of one fructose and one glucose, dissolving it into water (i.e., soft drinks) will you give you a pretty even 50/50 mixture of glucose and fructose. So sucrose should be sweeter than humdrum glucose but not as cloying as mega-sweet fructose. Fair enough.

fructose > sucrose > glucose.

And now the hard part. Let’s stick to soda sweeteners since they’re the focal point of so much quarreling. You will recall that HFCS-55 is 55% fructose. So it should be a little sweeter than sucrose but not a ton. You probably won’t even notice. Here, we’ll employ some amplitude-denoting greater-than symbols:

fructose >>> HFCS > sucrose >>> glucose

Sure, that looks about right.

But wait, there’s a possible complication. HFCS isn’t simply a disaccharide dissolved into water like sucrose. It’s a crazy science experiment, remember? So how sure are we that a bottle labeled HFCS-55 actually contains 55% fructose? Well… a 2010 study in the journalObesity attempted to measure fructose contents in a variety of soft drinks, and that is not what they found. Some drinks contained less than 55% fructose, but more exceeded that value. The highest recorded fructose amount was 65% and the mean was 59%. Experts have pointed out some flaws in this study (join the club, soda study, we’ll soon see that there is a lot of iffy research in this field), but much of these had to do with just how hard it is to accurately do this type of measurement, which brings us back to questioning our certainty about that 55% claim. So is HFCS sweeter than sucrose? Maybe?

Is HFCS making people fat?

The United States leads the developed world in both HFCS consumption and obesity, and both have climbed precipitously since the 1970s . But we can’t assume a causal relationship just from the correlation. After all, a lot of other things happened over the past few decades: increased portion sizes, more dining out, better video games, ketchup as a vegetable, pizza as vegetable, sandwiches with fried chicken instead of bread.

So is there any experimental evidence of HFCS’s fat-fueling edge? Yes, and no, and yes again, and so forth. It’s a hotly debated topic and so far the science doesn’t seem to be reaching a clear consensus. For every one study finding a connection between HFCS and obesity, there are a dozen retorts picking apart the methodology used by the researchers. For instance, a 2010 Princeton study reporting that rats given HFCS gained more weight than those with access to sucrose was met with a flurry of criticism, and not all of it from HFCS industry supporters.

Since the primary chemical difference between sucrose and HFCS is the percent of fructose, some researchers are focusing on studying the effects of fructose, as opposed to just HFCS. Glucose and fructose are metabolized differently by the body (e.g., fructose metabolism is not insulin dependent), so it seems reasonable to suspect they might have different effects on fat production. But here too the data are not exactly convincing. A 2012 meta-analysis^‡of fructose studies published in Annals of Internal Medicine found that fructose consistently led to weight gain in hypercaloric experiments (those in which fructose was given in additionto existing daily calorie intake) but not in isocaloric experiments (those swapping fructose for other sugar sources). This suggests that sugar calories in general, rather than specific sweeteners, were responsible for weight gain.

Another throwback. Image: Sweet One.

But there is a psychological component that such analyses might be missing. Humans consuming sugary beverages don’t methodically log those calories and then subtract accordingly from subsequent snacks encountered during the day. Typically a soda is just added to the heap of caloric intake as though it were water or unsweetened tea. And as more of such drinks are consumed, more uncompensated empty calories sneak into the average diet. Given this, we might consider if mayor Bloomberg – currently the butt of many media jokes, including advertisements with his frowning face Photoshopped onto the body of a prim middle-aged nanny – may actually have the right idea. His administration is focusing on a commodity that has become so cheap to produce that soda manufacturers can offer it in buckets almost as easily as in cups, and attempting to reduce the ease of passive calorie acquisition.

Of course, HFCS isn’t the only product made from cheap corn. Corn isn’t even the only crop whose prices have been driven down by U.S. farm subsidies (soy and wheat, among others, are also producing heavy yields). These plentiful goods make their way into processed snacks and cheap feed for livestock – two more potential contributors to America’s expanding girth. Singling out one dietary hazard to the exclusion of others has the potential to create a lot of confusion and polarized opinions. I’m not a huge fan of HFCS myself, but one of the downsides of its lousy public image is that it has opened the door for sugar manufacturers to market their product like it’s some kind of health food. “Made with real sugar.” Great.

Source:http://earthsky.org/human-world/a-brief-history-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup