What’s your opinion of high fructose corn syrup?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
45 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
I guess at the end of the day it’s no different than regular sugar but the fact is it’s so cheap means that it’s in everything increasing our overall sugar consumption which isn’t so good.
Same as Jim. It’s really no different than sugar, it’s just in every piece of food stuff that is made today. We need to stop subsidizing it, but eliminating those is harder than eliminating oil subsidies.
Didn’t have an opinion one way or the other until I got lab results that showed me in the pre-diabetes category. Since then I’ve done some reading on sugars and processed carbs and realized I had to make some changes. Diabetes has become pretty prevalant recently, and the trend can be traced to the large amounts of sugars and processed carbs we eat.
I agree. I also read somewhere that high fructose corn syrup does not satiate the feeling of hunger as well as cane or beet sugar do, so people consume more of it.
A few years ago I went on Atkins Diet phase I which means eliminate all sugar and carbohydrates. After 5 days I no longer felt hunger, so I had to record my daily consumption of everything, with calories and fat just to make sure I was eating at least 800 calories a day.
I lost 40 pounds in three months. But adding carbohydrates back in led me to binging on food. (The South Beach Diet solved that problem.)
Eliminate soda waters and the obesity and Diabetes problems would mostly disappear, and half the convenience stores would revert to gas stations that also sold beer and cigarettes.
Ewww.
Basically the less processed food a person eats, the better. HFCS is a very processed food. I avoid it. I think the current best wisdom is that:
-Fats as a category are not that bad for you, except for trans-fats (fried food, etc.), which are straight up evil. But the fat content in eggs, butter, etc, is not something to get too uptight about.
-Sugars as a category (including HFCS) are very, very bad for you if you if you eat too many of them, and “too many” is probably less than you think.
-There is a growing body of research that shows concern about salt as a health factor is way overblown, if not utter nonsense.
-Minimize the amount of food you eat that comes out of boxes or is highly processed in any way (especially fast food).
-All of these things matter differently relative to DNA and, to a lesser extent, lifestyle. Some people can be very active and need to watch their sugar and fat if they want to avoid being overweight, others can be only moderately active and always be relatively trim no matter what they eat.
-Some degree of physical activity is essential to good health, especially as one ages. Weight as a health factor matters a great deal at the high and low extremes, but in the middle zones, physical fitness and flexibility matter much, much more.
Source: I have worked for the last 10 years in natural foods, try to stay well read and am very skeptical of fads.
It’s a problem of correlation and figuring out the right factors which can be hard to do in studies.
Eggs are not that bad for you. The problem is people who eat eggs a lot also tend to eat bacon and sausage not to mention fried potatoes.
Salt is not that bad for you. But people who have high salt intake are usually getting it from junk food.
And so on.
Would you evil people stop talking about bacon?
Do you know how hard it is to quit the stuff?
I hate you all, you malevolent creatures. May you all burn in hell while being forced to read infinitely repeated Arthur Gilroy comments while Rand Paul plays the pennywhistle.
Simply repeat to yourself, “Once a week a small amount, once a month a little more,” and everything’s going to be OK… 🙂
“…while Rand Paul plays the pennywhistle.”
Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick, perhaps?
Salt can contribute to high blood pressure, but obesity at almost any level and inadequate exercise are the real causes. Salt contributes after those two.
Depends. I have to avoid as much salt as I can and take potassium besides. That keeps blood pressure normal. BP (my BP, don’t know about yours) goes up 50 mm after a restaurant meal.
I avoid it.
Well, let’s see:
Yes, the ecological damage is as important as the potential physiological damage.
I’m no foodie saint, but the ubiquity of HFC is starting to annoy me. A couple weeks back I got a quickie frozen burrito. Just tasting the thing, I could tell it was half HFC. A burrito shouldn’t be that sweet.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
As others have said, the problem is not so much the chemical composition although one wonders how close the industrial version is to the chemical model. The problem is that it has become a pervasive calorie filler to attract consumers with a sweet tooth (know any who natively are not?) to a particular brand even when the HFCS does not affect the taste.
According to a recent study in Nature, it seems that carbos that imitate proteins are a lot more dangerous and equally pervasive.
My anecdotal evidence is this. After dropping HFCS and gluten from my diet, I lost 50 pounds, feel better and am able to do exercise more easily. YMMV
I avoid it at all costs, and I’m not one of those anti-processed food people. but HFCS is especially bad for you, even more so than sugar.
And then there’s the environmental damage from all the corn that’s become king in the US agricultural landscape.
Just say no.
Sweet
I avoid it as much as possible. I try to make as much from scratch as time permits.
People say that HFCS is chemically identical to cane sugar. But I grew up in the deep south, and down there, folks really do drink a lot of Coca-Cola. (“It’s not just for breakfast anymore!” is just barely a joke.) I will tell you that Mexican Coca-Cola, made with cane sugar, tastes noticeably different from the American version made with corn syrup.
I’ve noticed that, too. HFCS Coke leaves a slick, sugary loogy in the back of your throat.
Real sugar tastes more bitter.
“People say that HFCS is chemically identical to cane sugar.”
And those people work in marketing.
They taste very, very different.
Before HFCS were created in the 1980s, a lot of cane sugar Coke and corn syrup were consumed in the south. My mother thought both were poisons.
it’s the devil’s spawn.
there’s a reason why the rest of the world bans this shyt.
I’ve seen on a research study at Science Daily about high fructose corn syrup being digested differently because it breaks down into a different sugar than glucose and eventually is stored as fat.
I have no expertise on this at all. But if you’re asking for opinions, I think it’s awful. The microwave and HFCS are the twin towers of dietary evil.
I think HFCS is definitely behind both the obesity epidemic and the diabeetus epidemic.
And you can trust me because I have a medical degree from Jenny McCarthy’s University of Correlation over Causation.
Ah yes. And who would know how the experiment is working better than one of the lab rats, right? <grin>
As a business student in grad school I spent time for fun as a lab rat for the psychology department. They will take anyone.
Everything everybody else has said about the unhealthiness of it, plus:
I think it is possible to find organic and non-HF and non-GMO corn syrup, but any HFCS you are likely to encounter either by itself or as an ingredient, is made from GMO corn. GMO sucks for the environment.
And as if that’s not enough, I hate the taste. In any concentration, it leaves a sour aftertaste.
yes. label reading is required these days.
Since I buy most of my groceries at Whole Foods, I don’t consume much HFCS. Whole Foods carries a lot of foods with added sugar, though, and I’m hoping that isn’t as bad as HFCS, though people tell me otherwise.
My main beverages are sweetened/flavored ice teas and beer, and probably both are harmful in the quantities that I ingest.
Sucks less than Republicans, NeoConfederates, CONservatives, and the FerengiMedia.
lol
I was not expecting this response in this thread
I prefer sugar. Otherwise it’s probably not any worse for you. We just put it in too much stuff because corporations run this country.
I haven’t seen anyone mention this yet…
One of my main objections to HFCS (other than the fact that it’s highly processed and everywhere), is the affect on the body’s appetite indicators.
Instead of telling the body that you have just eaten something and therefor you should feel more satiated, it has the opposite effect. So in addition to the calories you’ve just taken in, the HFCS makes the body think it hasn’t eaten much at all. That can’t be good for blood sugar, portion control, etc. This fake-out effect on metabolism squicks me out more than anything. I routinely ditch products that insist on including it.
Interestingly, I haven’t noticed a taste difference, but maybe that’s what makes me ill when I eat highly processed food (?). I can taste aspartame and splenda and avoid them.
Sorry I don’t have the time to track down the exact science sources and terminology at the moment. Maybe tomorrow.
No wonder McDonald’s saturates everything with it!
Try doing a blind taste test with HFCS Coca-Cola and Cane Sugar Coca-Cola. I’ll be amazed if you can’t tell the difference, and almost as amazed if you don’t prefer the cane sugar.
But, where so you find cane sugar Coca-Cola???????
It’s usually marketed at “Mexican” Coca-Cola, although I understand that even Mexico is set to move to HFCS Coke.
Now that you mention it, I’ve been put off by the flavor of most commercial drinks and juices. How can you ruin iced tea? Maybe the HFCS is what’s been making the difference.
This reminds me that the last time I had an actual coca-cola, I was disappointed by how nasty it tasted. (That’s Southern for “really gross.”) The so-called Mexican colas taste brighter and more palatable to me. I drink sodas very rarely, though, so maybe I haven’t been exposed to enough of it to tell specifically.
Cane sugar all the way, baby!
A degreed horticulturalist and organic farmer tells me that it’s real good to spray on your apple trees in Spring for quick nourishment before the leaves come out. It’s a plant sugar and good for plants. IMHO not for human consumption.
HFCS is the same as sugar, but because it is subsidized, is put into everything.
Why? Because sugar turns off hormones that tells you to stop eating because you are fool. So, in addition to being empty calories, it turns off hormones to stop you from eating, and as a sugar, causes an insulin reaction that starts the process down the slippery slope of insulin sensitivity to type ii diabetes.
Here, this video is a classic, as you might tell by the views. At times this video can be technical, but it is always clear of why sugar is bad, and why putting HFCS into EVERYTHING is why obesity/type ii diabetes is as prevalent as it is.
Just watch the damn video. Learn something. Be healthier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Fool = full. Freudian slip.
2 words: cheap poison.
And for that reason, likely the chief culprit in our current obesity epidemic.