High-fructose Corn Syrup Is NOT Good for You

The evil people who make high-fructose corn syrup (The Corn Refiners Association) are pushing their drug in a new series of commercials and a new website. Here is one of the commercials.



Here's what they didn't say in the ad, and would rather you didn't know, courtesy of Dr. Jonny Bowden at T-Nation.

The Corn Refiners Association, representing the makers of high-fructose corn syrup, is indeed fighting back after years of bad publicity. The commercials are everywhere. Here's the first one. The second, in which a hot chick offers a doofus guy an ice pop and he stutters, "But, duh, this has, like, high-fructose corn syrup," doesn't appear to be available online anymore. Which is a shame.

I especially love it when she patiently explains to him in her best "talking to a slow adult" tone that high-fructose corn syrup is natural 'cause it's made from, gosh, corn! And it's perfectly fine "in moderation." Silly boy. (If you put "high-fructose corn syrup" into the search engine on YouTube, you'll find some wicked parodies of the ads.)

Well, if that foxy lady offered me a poisoned mushroom I'd probably fall for it, but the facts don't change, and high-fructose corn syrup is the same dreadful crap it's always been. But, since it is the subject of massive confusion, I'll try to clear things up. Several issues are in play here, and they overlap.

First things first: In the beginning there was plain old table sugar, also known by its scientific name, sucrose. Sucrose is a disaccharide, meaning it's a blend of two simple saccharides, or sugars, in this case glucose and fructose.

Take a molecule of glucose and a molecule of fructose, link them with a chemical bond, and you've got yourself a molecule of sucrose. Put a bunch of those molecules together in a bowl, place the bowl on the table at the IHOP with a little spoon, and you're in business.

Now, it's pretty much a given that a high intake of sugar is bad for you, and a list of all the reasons why would fill this whole column. So let's save that for another day. What's interesting for our purposes today is that a fair amount of research has been done investigating exactly which of the two components of table sugar is worse for you. And fructose is the hands-down "winner."

Don't misunderstand me: The fructose found naturally in an apple is absolutely fine. But the difference between fructose in an apple and fructose in a soda is the difference between a beautiful fur coat on a wild fox and that same fur on the back of a fat lady at the opera. It's gorgeous on its original owner. On the lady, not so much.

In its original setting, fructose is surrounded with healthy nutrients, phytochemicals, and fiber. When it's extracted and made into a liquid sweetener, it's a nightmare.

Interestingly, fructose doesn't raise blood sugar very much, leading to the absolutely boneheaded idea — popular for a while — that it's a "good" sugar for diabetics. Fructose has now been shown in studies to lead to insulin resistance. It's also the sugar that most raises triglycerides, a serious risk factor for heart disease. In short, it's bad news.

Something else to consider: Table sugar used to be expensive. The average Joe could afford it, of course, but for food manufacturers wanting to sweeten products it was a high-ticket item. So its prohibitive cost was one reason you didn't find sucrose in every single food item we bought. Even Cokes and Pepsis only came in eight- or 12-ounce sizes.

Then, because of situations that involved all sorts of political wheeling and dealing and resulted in both sugar tariffs and corn subsidies, manufacturers were highly motivated to find a solution to the problem of expensive sugar. Enter high-fructose corn syrup.

Take a subsidized crop like corn, perform a bunch of chemical operations on it, and voilà, you had something that was even sweeter than sucrose at a fraction of the cost. It could be added to virtually everything on the table, making those items tastier and, of course, more profitable.

Now here's where it gets tricky. Chemically speaking, high-fructose corn syrup really isn't that different from table sugar. In case you didn't take your gingko this morning and have already forgotten the first paragraph of this story, sucrose is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose. High-fructose corn syrup, at least the most common kind found in soft drinks, is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.

It's not a huge difference, but the problem is that it's everywhere, including foods that were never sweetened before. It's the major sweetener found in soft drinks (it's been used in Coca-Cola since 1985, for example), which constitute a double-digit percentage of the calories we consume as a nation. One form of it, which is used in baked goods, has an even higher percentage of fructose.

Thus, we're now consuming more fructose than ever. Even though HFCS is only slightly higher in fructose than table sugar, people who drink a lot of soda can easily consume 20 to 30 grams of additional liquid fructose each day.

The Corn Refiners Association's pro-HFCS ads make two arguments:

• It's no worse than sugar. Okay, maybe, but that's like saying Salems are no worse than Marlboros.

• It's natural because it's made from corn. Maybe so, but so is ethanol, and I'm not drinking that either.

Tags: High-fructose Corn Syrup, Not Good for You, HFCS, nutrition, food, Health, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, glucose, fructose, sugar, obesity, insulin resistance