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The case of Sugar v. Corn Syrup — 36 Comments

  1. We didn’t encounter Obama and SEIU thugs either on the savanna.

    We encountered lots of hyenas, though, so we should have been prepared.

  2. Back OT, I’m skeptical about claims that high fructose corn syrup is less healthy than sugar.

    After all, sucrose is a disaccharide comprising glucose and fructose, so half of sugar is itself fructose. Without studying this at all (or indeed knowing anything specific about it), it’s difficult for me to see why a change from 50% to 100% fructose should make such a difference (particularly since the body can make glucose – the only fuel of the brain – even out of proteins, through gluconeogenesis, so conversion of fructose to glucose probably takes place readily).

    I’m not dismissing such claims, but rather just saying I find them difficult to accept, which acceptance would require a lot of rock-hard substantiation (not New Age mumbo-jumbo).

  3. Fructuse is basically corn and basically carbohydrates. Meaning, eating too much carbohydrates is what causes diabetes. Seriously, I’m not kidding.

    Humans either ate a crack load of meat (no diabetes risk) or they ate the grain which would rot in winter some time soon, unless eaten.

    No where did they eat like even the poor in America: lots of meat, lots of carbs, and no exercise whatsoever when driving in cars.

    Americans don’t even do basic Chi gong exercises… not even 10 minutes a day. Not even 1 minute a day.

    The body goes through an extreme refinement process turning carbohydrates, unused glycogen, into sugar and fat. Replacing “sugar” with more “carbs” isn’t exactly a good idea. In fact, it might be a better idea to just suck in the sugar directly, at least then your body doesn’t produce toxins turning carbs INTO sugar.

  4. (particularly since the body can make glucose — the only fuel of the brain — even out of proteins, through gluconeogenesis, so conversion of fructose to glucose probably takes place readily).

    http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/fit.nation/obesity.map/

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.s.sugarconsumption.2.jpg

    I think the reason why people haven’t figured this out is because there is no obesity stats before 1985, before HFCS came on the market in a big way via subsidies.

    If it turns out obesity is the result of government subsidies to the farm industry, that’s going to be an interesting research topic at the end of this century, one way or another.

    A: HFCS is a gooey liquefied sweetener that is abundant in processed foods and beverages. The typical American consumes an astonishing 50-100 pounds of HFCS per year!
    The derivation of HFCS: Corn is milled to cornstarch, a powdery substance that is then processed into corn syrup. Corn syrup consists primarily of glucose. Through a complex chemical process, the glucose in the corn syrup is converted to fructose. HFCS results from the mixing of this fructose back in with glucose in varying percentages to achieve the desired sweetness: 55% fructose/45% glucose ratio of HFCS is used to sweeten soft drinks; 42% fructose/58% glucose ratio of HFCS is used in baked processed foods.

    I have yet to figure just what exactly this does to the body’s balancing systems, but it’s probably not a good idea all in all. Especially if we consider the nature of obesity and diabetics.

    Diabetes is a medical condition characterized by high blood sugar and poor insulin performance. Early diagnosis of the disease is key to preventing major systemic (whole body) complications. Long-standing or poorly controlled diabetes increases the risk of significant damage to organs including the heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas.
    Pancreatic Overexertion In Type 2 Diabetes
    Sustained high blood sugar is common to type 2 diabetes. Sugary blood passing through the pancreas triggers an insulin release from a group of specialized cells called “beta cells.” Insulin attempts to remove sugar from the bloodstream by pushing it into body tissues, especially muscles. However, resistance to the action of insulin at the body tissues prohibits sugar’s clearance from the blood. Consequently, the beta cells overexert themselves, but fail to lower blood sugar due to the body tissues’ inability to absorb it.

    Read more: http : // www. livestrong. com /article/71428-diabetes-affect-pancreas/#ixzz1pnE5QP9N

    So basically, the body rejects sugar because its muscles and tissues are over saturated, putting the sugar into the blood stream instead, which basically serves as a poison to the kidneys, liver, and pancrease, resulting in organ failure sooner or later, or just leading to Type 1. But they’re not trying to find ways to resolve the issue of the block, but attempting to directly regulate sugar levels in the blood. Why does this happen in the first place? Lack of exercise? People eating too many carbs and not burning it up via use of their muscles? The fact that the body goes haywire when it ingests HFCS?

    They don’t know, and we don’t know, but they’re making money off of it, is all I know. And people in America, if you check the graph, are somehow falling into the pits.

    Like most people, I’ve only recently heard of HFCS. This is the first time I’ve heard it singled out. And for that, perhaps we should all be glad of people’s potential mistakes in marketing.

  5. A little confusion there.

    All sugars – including sucrose (table sugar), fructose, and glucose – ARE carbohydrates, i.e., compounds of the formula C(H2O)n. In the present context “a sugar” and “a carbohydrate” are essentially synonymous terms. (Cellulose is a carbohydrate too, but obviously that’s not relevant here.)

    Sucrose consists of fructose and glucose units linked by a glycosidic linkage that readily cleaves in the presence of weak acids; for this reason, sucrose hydrolyzes back into its constituent monosaccharides in the stomach. (Measuring the rate of this reaction is a classic lab experiment.) Consequently, consuming one mole of sugar is identical physiologically with one mole each of glucose and fructose.

    Pace Kevin Trudeau & Co., we don’t produce unspecified “toxins” in the course of normal metabolism. We generate some reactive species (e.g., aldehydes) during metabolism, and cumulatively suffer damage from oxygen free radicals generated in the course of oxidative metabolism (as outlined in my last pedantic rant), but those are both a function of living, not of nutrition.

  6. A mixture of 55% fructose/45% glucose is basically indistinguishable from sucrose, for the reasons mentioned above.

    Now I’m not saying we don’t have an obesity epidemic – God knows we do – but I think that that comes from overeating generally, not from high fructose corn syrup in particular.

    To be clear, I’m also not saying that we shouldn’t consume less high fructose corn syrup. Anyone who’s overweight ought to dial back the chow generally speaking. I’m addressing the proposition that obesity results peculiarly from replacing sucrose with a metabolically equivalent amount of high fructose corn syrup. That I do not believe. In fact, I strongly suspect that people have latched onto high fructose corn syrup as an excuse for their own obesity, taking on Kevin Trudeau’s tag line, “It ain’t your fault.” Yeah, it is.

    (Btw, re “HFCS is a gooey liquefied sweetener.” So is glucose, and sucrose (e.g., molasses) as concentrated aqueous solutions. All three sugars – sucrose, glucsose, and fructose – are crystalline solids when pure.)

  7. Remind me again, where do you go to scoop up handfuls of pure white sucrose? You know, since apparently there’s no process like purifying sugar cane into table sugar or anything.

  8. lets try that again

    The corn industry promoters “characterize high fructose corn syrup as a natural product. It is not – it is man-made,” said Adam Fox, an attorney for the sugar industry plaintiffs, led by Western Sugar Corp. “Yet they are advertising it as identical to sugar cane and sugar beets.”
    —————————
    Remind me again, where do you go to scoop up handfuls of pure white sucrose? You know, since apparently there’s no process like purifying sugar cane into table sugar or anything.

  9. “A mixture of 55% fructose/45% glucose is basically indistinguishable from sucrose, for the reasons mentioned above.”

    Scientists do not understand the human body. They cannot make that claim and nobody here or anyone else can prove it, either way.

  10. All three sugars — sucrose, glucsose, and fructose — are crystalline solids when pure.

    And that is also why a car engine runs the same on premium, diesel, and non leaded plus. Thus there’s no real difference. After all, they’re just the same liquid when pure. More or less, right.

    Actually there is a significant difference. The human body is a lot more complicated and is a more accurate reader of reality than the human eye. Or mind. Or a car engine for that matter.

    Things are not as simple as they seem on the surface. Not with politics. Not with petrol. Not with bio-chemistry.

  11. Ymar doesn’t know what he does not know.

    Know Avogadro’s number? Know what a mole is, in chemistry jargon? Know the molecular structure of 6-carbon sugars? 5-carbon? How are you with the Krebs’ cycle, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate) generation, the key to aerobic energy generation? What happens with anaerobic metabolism? Why is lactate a product thereof?

    BTW, Ymar, scientists in aggregate understand a tremendous amount about the human body. It is regrettable that Ymar has put on his nihilist, know-nothing hat. He is simply unable to comprehend Occam’s micro-lecture.

    Occam is blessedly 100% right-again, as always-and always lucid, which I am not.

  12. The dose makes the poison.

    [Fructose] also has a lower glycemic value than glucose or sucrose. Indeed, fructose raises insulin less than glucose; however, fructose results in higher ghrelin levels, which boost rather than suppress appetite like insulin does.

    Foods cause many inter-related reactions in the body. Doesn’t it seem silly on its face to claim that two different chemicals create exactly the same biological cascade?

    Fructose tends to make you hungry. The dose to cross that threshold may be different for each person. Fructose imposes a greater processing load on the liver. They’re not metabolically equivalent.

    You have to manage your health with the best info available. Truly the best test is to experiment on how various foods affect you.

  13. Here comes a scientist to defend the flock. But such things are not my concern and were never going to propel human progress a single step forward. It’s simply tribal loyalty. Of what worth is that to me?

  14. Interesting how everyone is talking about the similarities or differences between sugar and HFCS.

    I’m vastly more concerned about the waste in subsidies to corn producers and tariffs on cane imports.

    When government stepped in, they created a wildly inefficient market place that could use some rectification. If we cut both immediately, we would throw the market into turmoil, but if we started cutting back on both, in a published and hard timeline, we could let the market determine which tastes better or is more efficient to use.

    And save several billion a year.

  15. Question for the scientists: Does, and to what extent, the human body extract HFCS from the corn kernel upon digestion? Is the human product chemically the same as the industrial product. Is it as pure as the industrial product?

  16. Foxmarks’ link is to “Mark’s Daily Apple- Primal Living in the Modern World”. Real scientific? No.

  17. Is the human product chemically the same as the industrial product.

    Fructose is fructose. Its origin is immaterial, and assertions to the contrary reflect a subliminal vitalist perspective. Fructose from different sources could have different impurities, but the fructose itself is the same.

    Those who rail against fructose often also advocate eating fruit as part of a healthy diet, apparently unaware of the etymology of the word “fructose.”

  18. Fructose imposes a greater processing load on the liver. They’re not metabolically equivalent.

    What’s not metabolically equivalent to fructose? This is an unbased comparative.

    The discussion was not about replacing, e.g., glucose with fructose. It was about replacing sucrose with high fructose corn syrup, which as Y mentioned above, is roughly 50% glucose and 50% fructose, and so not fundamentally different from sucrose itself, which is exactly 50-50 in the same constituents.

    To reiterate re metabolic equivalence, sucrose (which is glucose-fructose, could be named glucosylfructose) is metabolically equivalent to an equimolar (i.e., having the same number of molecules of each) mixture of glucose and fructose, because stomach acid catalyzes the reaction sucrose (or glucose-fructose) –> glucose + fructose.

    So eating 10 g of sucrose is equivalent to eating 5 g of glucose followed by 5 g of fructose (I’m using masses rather than moles for the sake of concreteness).

  19. And that is also why a car engine runs the same on premium, diesel, and non leaded plus.

    Couple points. First, those fuels differ fundamentally in composition. Your analogy would be valid (or more valid, anyway) for proposals to replace, say, pure glucose with pure fructose. It is not valid with respect to replacing 50% glucose/50% fructose with 55% fructose/45% glucose.

    Second, and more importantly for all neo-vitalist perspectives, metabolism erases the origins of nutrients by breaking them down to essential building blocks. For example, proteins end up as their constituent amino acids, no matter whether the protein came from wagyu beef or a wharf rat.

  20. Obviously some body needs to get a mechanic to tell them diesel engines are not the same as gasoline engines.

    The point about sucrose is that sucrose is no longer being used. The graph I linked to shows that, and nobody has said that they have a better one. HFCS from corn replaces sucrose in American consumption, diabetes and obesity somehow goes from 10% to 30% from 1985 to 2006. People may think this is a just a statistical incongruity due to coincidence, but it’s not going to make sucrose equivalent to HFCS.

    People were using sugar and what not, way before HFCS, and they never had the same issues as we do now. In other parts of the world, the same is true. It’s just a little bit hard to believe that a chemical chain, created in similar fashions to drugs, is not going to have “side effects”.

    And fructose is not the same as fructose. People use the same name, but they’re ignoring several differences. Just like people ignore the difference between diesel and gasoline. Not because it is unimportant, but because it never occurs to them to maybe check what is really going on. The advertisement campaign then takes advantage of this by calling it the same, when it isn’t.

  21. OB: You miss my point that the dose makes the poison. I am aware that HFCS is a blend of two sugars. The question is how much fructose can be ingested without negatively impacting other systems.

    I say that fructose leads to a different biological cascade than other sugars. Don Carlos doesn’t like my link, but offers no alternative. You can go through mine to get to whatever evidence is available.

    And I acknowledge that human biochemistry is not fully understood, that the evidence is incomplete and conclusion cannot be made with certainty, so I say try it in your own body. You don’t need to know organic chemistry to know if you feel better after a few weeks.

    Human biochemistry breaks all food into useful chemicals and waste chemicals. OB waves away the problem that the wharf rat protein matrix leads to production of different and perhaps more waste than wagyu protein. And OB ignores the fact that we cannot just buy and eat “wharf rat protein”. We eat chunks of wharf rat, which include traces of whatever the rat slurped off the pier.

    Similarly, HFCS is not a blend of laboratory-pure fructose and laboratory-pure glucose. Traces of the industrial process remain in HFCS. Traces also remain in other processed sugar. Which poison do you want to eat?

  22. Metabolism cannot erase the origin of proteins. It matters significantly for athletes if they are digesting whey protein and whether it is powder or in meat format. Not every protein source has the complete amino acid listing, and athletes that are using proteins that lack sufficient diversity of amino acids, will eventually find their body cannibalizing itself for the right amino acids. So even with protein, there’s a world of difference between what the human body requires to run, and what can be ingested, where source matters greatly.

    The Western world has been held in hock to proclamations from on high, from studies and government manipulation, about the human body and what is “good” or “bad” for it. Often for little more reason than monetary gain. Until individuals start figuring this out for themselves, conducting their own experiments, and stop taking the word of the likes of the Global Warming cult seriously, they’re never going to find the truth.

    Back before the West considered scientists, politicians, and corporate heads as if they were a caste of aristocrats, people found out the hard way what worked and what didn’t, what herbs were good and what were bad. Humans now can either make use of that knowledge gained from the past, or begin their own searches. Drink a soda pop with 50 grams of HFCS per day, for 30 months. Then quit and drink water for the same, do not change your diet in any shape whatsoever. After a month for the body to reach equivalent point, use sugar with water in equal amounts and see if it makes a difference. And at the end, get a week long fast and see what metabolizing fat alone, no outside nutrients, does.

    Every human here has at their own disposal the tools and the means, as well as a very complicated suite of sensory devices (namely the human body), to conduct far better experiments than has ever been done by a Western scientist operating under a government grant.

  23. One other thing, HFCS is said to be able to increase the shelf life of products. How is it able to do that if it is just a mixture of sucrose and fructose? I’ve heard of various types of preservation humans used before, but I have never heard them mix fruit juice with sugar cane to preserve meat or bread. Maybe this technique was just non-economical, but somehow I don’t think it is chemically the same as just a mixture or chain combination.

  24. I grew up in the south and can say without a doubt that I don’t want high-fructose corn syrup in my sweet tea.

  25. The question is how much fructose can be ingested without negatively impacting other systems.

    Let me try again. We are comparing ingesting 10 g of sucrose (5 g each of glucose and fructose, with the caveat above re masses). with ingesting 10 g of high fructose corn syrup (4.5 g of glucose, 5.5 g of fructose, per Y’s comment above). OK?

    We’re not talking about absolute levels of carbohydrates consumed, e.g., comparing ingestion of 10 g of a given carbohydrate with 100 g. That’s a different question, and one on which we agree. We’re talking about ingesting 10 g each of sucrose and high fructose corn syrup, because the question before the house is whether replacing the former with the latter leads to deleterious effects.

  26. OB waves away the problem that the wharf rat protein matrix leads to production of different and perhaps more waste than wagyu protein.

    No, it doesn’t. Not for protein from the same organ in each case (e.g., muscle).

    All proteins comprise the same 20 amino acids, in varying proportions and sequences, but the same constituent amino acids. The stomach, and then the small intestine, see to it that any protein ingested is broken down into those amino acids. Anything that cannot be so hydrolyzed is said to be “indigestible,” and is ultimately turned over to the local sewage treatment plant, along with the detritus from the intestinal bacterial flora.

  27. One other thing, HFCS is said to be able to increase the shelf life of products. How is it able to do that if it is just a mixture of sucrose and fructose?

    Because the witch doctor chants over it at the factory.

  28. One last shot. The 26 letters used in a Shakespeare sonnet are the same ones used in Mein Kampf. The two pieces differ in the sequence of letters, but not in the nature of the letters themselves. If one took each document and broke it down to its constituent letters, one could not tell from which document those letters came.

    That’s the point.

  29. Interesting discussion that seems to confirm my uninformed preconceived notions. I’ll continue to indulge in the occasional candy bar.

    There is another aspect no one seems to have covered. I was just watching the documentary, THEM! and apparently giant ants like sugar, without distinguishing the formulation, so I recommend moving away from any large stores of sweets in your neighborhood.

  30. OB: You appear to be blinded by science. 🙂 I mean that you are only looking at the subset of facts that you like. You’re hand-waving away the biologic processes that turn on milligrams of differences in chemical composition.

    It’s kind of like the “food miles” argument. You say the grape at the table is the same, no matter where it was grown. A more-comprehensive view accounts for *how* the grape got to the table, and any health impacts of the entire process of getting a grape to the table.

  31. To follow on to one of Neo’s points, I will never forgive Hershey’s for making the plain chocolate syrup with corn syrup. It changed the product entirely, and not for the better.

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