Sugar Farmers Sue Corn Processors Over HFCS

If you see a "sugar" count in the nutrition graphic on a box of food, it exactly means exactly all this already. Fructose, glucose, maltose, sucrose (which, again, is just 1:1 fructose:glucose), all of them; they're all "sugar" in the nutrition box now.

I'm not saying HFCS is good. But I'm saying that it's real hard to make a case against calling it "sugar" because it is sugar, and already referred to as such on packaging.

Now, you want to make things interesting, make them break down what's actually in HFCS, including the byproducts. Now that would be revealing.

make them break down what's actually in HFCS

Exactly. You said above that honey is 70% the same stuff. But that other 30% is what makes it honey and not ant poison.

But that other 30% is what makes it honey and not ant poison.

No.

HFCS is 55% fructose, 45% glucose, trace amounts of enzymes left over from the conversion process. Allergic reactions would come from the trace amounts of enzymes. I do not dismiss allergy claims in any way, but the enzymes are trace amounts. That's enough to trigger an allergic reaction if you have it, but that's all. It rounds up to about 55/45 fructose/glucose.

Honey, by contrast, is 70% fructose and glucose. The other 30% (that you claim makes it "not rat poison") is mostly water, along with a couple of other sugars (maltose, which is two glucose molecules linked together, and sucrose, which we've already discussed). There's also a small basket of enzymes, proteans, vitamins, minerals, and other misc. products all in trace amounts. Water, as a rule, does not convert "rat poison" to "not rat poison;" if it did, the mostly-water can-of-soft-drink would neutralise the "rat poison" of HFCS far more effectively than the water in honey, since there's so much more of it.

Honey is over 99% sugar and water. Of that over 99% of total composition, 70% of it is identical to HFCS, less the specific conversion enzymes they use. That's what I was saying.

My actual hobby horse is the idea that so-called 'real sugar' swap-out for HFCS would cure anything. (Other than allergic reactions to a specific enzyme. I'm not arguing that.) The crime of HFCS is generally its contribution to the ubiquity of sugar. In particular, in the form of fructose.

(Which, I remind you, is 50% of table sugar, vs. 55% of HFCS. 10% different. That's all. Swapping out all the HFCS in the world and replacing it with sucrose would have very little effect. Again, except for those allergic to the enzyme used to convert glucose to fructose.)

That's what I'm really on about.

And then you must confront the fact that for some reason HFCS appears to cause obesity that other forms of sugar don't.

A one percent difference in DNA is significant. Would you blame the trace content, the less-than-one-percent in HFCS?

And then you must confront the fact that for some reason HFCS appears to cause obesity that other forms of sugar don't.
Except that this isn't true. That's the entire point. Sucrose is just great at causing obesity. Sucrose is metabolised exactly the same way as HFCS. Swapping (no-pulp/pulp-strained) sucrose-sweetened fruit juice at the same sugar level as Coke? No meaningful effect - despite the fact that HFCS has 10% more fructose, given the same amount of sugars overall.

Fruit, with all the same sucrose, is better because it's loaded with fibre, which inhibits sugar absorption. Fruit juice, lacking the fibre, may have other ingredients which actually are good for you (vitamin C, et al) but the sugars are no different, and most importantly, the effects on obesity are also no different.

The way HFCS has led to the obesity epidemic is not through the metabolic processing of HFCS itself. It's the way that it's made sugar extremely low cost, and the way that it and other fructose-containing sugars (which are also now cheap as chips, as it were) have got into everything. The ubiquity of fructose is a real good candidate for the cause of metabolic syndrome; the label it's shipped under (sucrose, HFCS, "corn syrup," whatever) doesn't mean much.

(There's also an important note in that most processed foods - like, everything at a fast food restaurant - have their fibre broken down, intentionally. This makes it store and retain both texture and flavour much better. It also makes the sugars in it far more readily absorbed because there's no fibre present inhibiting sugar absorption.)

Both table sugar (sucrose) and HFCS are a combination of fructose and glucose in very similar ratios.

Glucose (and maltose, which is just two glucose molecules linked with an oxygen bond) is critical for life. It powers the ATP reaction in cells. Everything in the body takes it up, and uses it immediately. If it doesn't have any, it'll convert stored energy (fats, etc) to it. Only if there's excess will there be conversion to fat, and since it's taken up so preferentially, there's not much excess.

Fructose, by contrast, is converted almost entirely (95%ish) to fat, even if the body is in dire need of immediate energy. It's taken up exclusively by the liver. This is why high-fructose diet livers look a lot like alcoholic livers. It also doesn't trigger the satiation response, so you eat it and don't feel like you've eaten anything. And it has various other effects that do things like make cells insulin-insensitive, which takes you straight to Type II diabetes.

But it doesn't matter where that fructose comes from - HFCS, sucrose ("real sugar"), it's all the same.

If you're living in the wild and sucrose and honey are rare and found only in the most bountiful parts of the year, converting half that intake directly to long-term storage is a very good idea. Not triggering satiation response is also a very good idea, because you want to get as ready for winter as possible while you have this great body-fat source in front of you. That's why I disagree with the idea going around that fructose is a toxin. It makes evolutionary sense when rare.

The problem is that it's no longer rare. It's everywhere, and in everything, because it's so. damned. cheap.

(And also because it hides the taste of salt very well. Most colas have a lot of salt in them (which makes you thirsty) and a lot of caffeine (which is a diuretic). This helps colas sell more colas. They hide the salt flood with, you guessed it, sugar. Also, salt is a great preservative in canned foods, but things too salty get rejected, so you just add more sugar to flood it out. See how that cycle works?)

And that word "natural" is, well, an outright lie.

I'm only seeing "corn syrup" on packages (and not "natural") on packages. I agree any claim of "natural" is bullshit, but it's exactly the same chemicals. They're breaking down glucose chains into individual molecules of glucose (as does your body), then converting 55% of the glucose into fructose enzymatically. They do this because fructose is sweeter-tasting than glucose is, which is unfortunate, since glucose is actually just fine for you.

Any allergic reactions are probably going to come from that second enzyme, by the way. That's a complicated reaction.

Look, what my real hobby horse here is that people think "real sugar" (by which they mean sucrose) is SO MUCH BETTER than HFCS. It's not. I've gone over the chemistry with people, talking about how it's the same thing, and at the end of that whole discussion, where I talk about the chemistry, and how so much of it's coming from sugared sodas, and so on and so forth, and the response I get?

"Well, the solution is to drink Mexican coke! They use real sugar!"

Which is exactly wrong. Unless you have an allergy to some trace-measurements byproduct in HFCS that's left over from the manufacturing process, it's not. It's 10% less bad. 12% tops. Not an order of magnitude, not hugely and overwhelmingly different. It's metabolised exactly the same way because it's exactly the same sugars.

If you drink four 12-oz cans of sugared sodas a day, you will do better changing that to three HFCS-sugared sodas and five strips of bacon than you will by changing to four table-sugar/sucrose sweetened sodas. You will reduce your fructose consumption much more that way, and your body will store less fat.

Yes: fructose is converted to body-stored fat more efficiently than fat is. And it has the bonus points of not triggering satiation hormones, so your brain doesn't know you've eaten it, and you're still hungry.

Yes, five strips of bacon will have a better effect on your overall diet than a 12-oz can of "Mexican" Coca-Cola.

(Well, except maybe for the nitrites. But we'll assume you get bacon without sodium nitrite used as a preservative, or change it to some other meat product with just as much fat as bacon and no sodium nitrite. You get the idea.)

That's what I'm really on about.

If you drink four cans of soda a day...
*blink*

there's no way I can finish that...

Four cans is 48 oz of soda.

A "large" soda at Jack in the Box is 44 oz.

Lots of people drink (almost) four cans of soda with a single meal.

That's the real problem.

No matter what's in there,
that much of it is not without consequence.

But I'm fairly certain that the same sugar
mentioned in the Little House books
(Don't eat all the sugar!)
is the least bad alternative among what
could be in that bucket of fizz.

Is refined sugar any more natural than high-fructose corn syrup? I thought they were both processed plant matter.

It's more complicated. It doesn't take enzymatic digestion to get sucrose out of cane sugar. Most of what you're doing with cane syrup is pulling out everything else; with HFCS, you're taking a glucose molecule and enzymatically converting it to a fructose molecule, which is a lot more complicated.

(And this is why cane sugar/sucrose goes back centuries and HFCS to 1966.)

The reason that is done is because fructose tastes much sweeter than glucose. Not all sugars have equal sweetness, and of the naturally-occurring sugars, fructose is the sweetest AFAIK.