Do you think high fructose corn syrup makes you fatter than sugar? You're not alone. In the culture wars, they like lines blurry and corporations who got rid of corn syrup have been using that as a marketing claim.
Three top researchers say they have corrected inaccuracies and misunderstandings concerning high fructose corn syrup's impact on the American diet and examined how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers this sweetener in light of the upcoming 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans in their session, 'High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sorting Myth from Reality', at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.
"Contrary to its name, high fructose corn syrup is essentially a corn sugar," stated sweetener expert John S. White, Ph.D., president of White Technical Research. "Recent marketing claims that sugar is healthier than high fructose corn syrup are misleading to consumers."
"By every parameter yet measured in human beings, high fructose corn syrup and sugar are identical. This is not surprising since high fructose corn syrup and sugar are metabolized the same by the body, have the same level of sweetness and the same number of calories per gram," noted James M. Rippe, M.D., cardiologist and biomedical sciences professor at the University of Central Florida.
"This is a marketing issue, not a metabolic issue," stated David Klurfeld, Ph.D., national program leader for human nutrition in USDA's Agricultural Research Service and editor of the June 2009 Journal of Nutrition supplement, "The State of the Science on Dietary Sweeteners Containing Fructose," in response to recent reformulations by manufacturers of products that once contained high fructose corn syrup. "The real issue is not high fructose corn syrup. It's that we've forgotten what a real serving size is. We have to eat less of everything," he noted.
Increased Caloric Intake, Not a Single Sweetener, the Likely Cause of Obesity
Fructose-containing sweeteners — such as sugar, invert sugar, honey, fruit juice concentrates, and high fructose corn syrup — are essentially interchangeable in composition, calories, and metabolism. Replacing high fructose corn syrup in foods with other fructose-containing sweeteners will provide neither improved nutrition nor a meaningful solution to the obesity crisis, according to Dr. White. "In light of similarities in composition, sweetness, energy content, processing, and metabolism, claims that such sweetener substitutions bring nutritional benefit to children and their families appear disingenuous and misguided," White says.
The American Medical Association helped put to rest a common misunderstanding about high fructose corn syrup and obesity, stating that "high fructose syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners." Even former critics of high fructose corn syrup dispelled myths and distanced themselves from earlier speculation about the sweetener's link to obesity in a comprehensive scientific review published in the December 2008 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Comments
Anonymous (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 08:38 AM
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As a final note, there is a *major* compositional difference between HFCS and Sugar - HFCS is high in Fructose - too much of which causes the body to improperly regulate insulin levels. Notice that the article is careful to say "Fructose-containing sweeteners...are essentially interchangeable in composition"; glucose and sucrose-based sweeteners are *not* interchangeable.
river-wind (not verified) | 06/09/09 | 09:40 AM
There isn't any more mercury in HFCS than there is in any other ingredient. If you're worried about mercury, you should be way more concerned about coal burning power plants than a corn processing method that is obsolete in the US. I wrote about mercury in HFCS extensively when the report report "Not So Sweet: Missing Mercury and High Fructose Corn Syrup" came out, feel free to stop by and follow the links to more information.
As for the fructose/glucose ratio of HFCS and other sweeteners, there actually isn't more fructose in HFCS (42/53 or 55/41) than in other fructose containing sweeteners such as honey (50/44) and sugar (50/50). Pure fructose is metabolized differently, but this can not be generalized to all sweeteners that contain fructose, even researchers that were previously critics of HFCS have admitted.
Anastasia (not verified) | 06/14/09 | 22:31 PM
"I wrote about mercury in HFCS extensively..." Awesome! I read your post at http://www.geneticmaize.com/2009/02/something-tastes-bad/, and I agree with all of your points (the tests which have prompted this recent wave of reporting were poorly constructed, the reporting itself has been equally poor, the lack of detailed info on the type of mercury is a major problem with the given conclusions, the Environmental Health study using inflammatory language does not help), save one. The Environmental Health study from 2005 you link to is not a controlled test of consumer foods with unfounded finger-pointing at HFCS as the source of mercury; it's a test of HFCS samples, some of which did contain mercury. While your critiques are good, and the data is indeed three years old (many of the HFCS producers have likely switched to membrane methods in the intervening years), I would argue that getting samples of HFCS from the food producers may be prone to bias on the part of the food producers. Certainly it is possible to take random samples in the earliest stages of the chain of delivery, but consideration of bias would need to be taken into account.
That mercury has both been known to exist in HFCS (at levels between .065ug/g and .57ug/g (or 65ppb to 570ppb, well above the EPA drinking water limit of 2ppb quoted in the Chemrisk report, who chose to average all samples in their calculations, even though the contamination is expected to only exist in a subset of HFCS producers to begin with)), and that there continues to be a known vector for introduction of mercury into HFCS, there seems to me to be a likely correlation to be made. Hopefully a follow-up study can provide us with a causational link between the use of mercury-grade caustic soda in HFCS and its presence in consumer food, *or* it can refute that claim completely (likely by showing that your suggested route of environmental mercury in a large portion of the ingredients in the products is the actual source).
In my opinion, the question needs to be three-fold:
1) Given that the membrane grade method of producing HFCS is a mercury-free *and* cheaper, why isn't is being used everywhere?
2) Is it a good idea to have any one ingredient, especially a processed ingredient which is potentially more likely to contain industrial contaminants, so prevalent across the average US diet?
3) Does HFCS contain more contaminants per volume than similar sweeteners, and are those contaminants known to be harmful to human health?
"As for the fructose/glucose ratio of HFCS and other sweeteners, there actually isn't more fructose in HFCS (42/53 or 55/41) than in other fructose containing sweeteners..." which I think I noted in my post, pointing out that the difference between fructose-containing sweeteners and sweeteners which gain their taste from non-fructose sources was the critical difference being glossed over by the initial post.
As an aside, hello to a fellow biology student from the Chesapeake! Washington College (Chestertown, Eastern shore) grad here.
river-wind (not verified) | 06/15/09 | 19:05 PM
river-wind (not verified) | 06/15/09 | 19:09 PM
The whole HFCS issue (or non-issue as the case may be) is just so out of proportion. I feel like there are these huge issues out there and instead of focusing on them (like mercury form power plants), people choose something that isn't even substantiated by research and start a crusade about it.
The old form of HFCS purification has been phased out in the US (according to industry reports), but it is still used in other countries. If the food processing companies here in the US were halfway smart, they'd only source US HFCS and then advertise that fact.
I also wish the researchers would have addressed the complication of different types of mercury.
Anastasia (not verified) | 06/17/09 | 12:51 PM
I didn't know that US sources of HFCS were purely membrane-grade only; I thought some still used mercury-grade. I'd love to be wrong on this point, as it would reduce my concerns (a fair amount). Thanks for the info - you don't have a source, do you?
Good talking with you!
river-wind (not verified) | 06/17/09 | 15:59 PM
