SwordoftheVistula
06-01-2011, 04:20 PM
Posting the relevant part of an article that summarizes all the arguments for & against it.
It's slightly different chemically, but not enough to really matter.
It's a lot cheaper, so people can consume a lot more of it.
This is why European soft drink sizes are so small, and their restaurants tend to not have free refills. It would cost way too much otherwise.
Also explains why pastries and such in Europe taste different, not nearly as sweet.
http://naturalhealthsherpa.com/dirty-truth-high-fructose-corn-syrup/52786
Now in the “olden” days, sugar—table sugar that is, plain old sucrose—was expensive. Not maybe for the average Joe picking up a bag at the grocery store, but for food manufacturers wanting to sweeten products, it was definitely a high-ticket ingredient.
Between sugar tariffs that drove the price of sugar higher and corn subsidies the forced the price of corn lower, a perfect environment was setup to allow food manufacturers 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 voila, you had something that was even sweeter than sucrose at a fraction of the cost. Better yet, it could be added to virtually everything on the table, making those items even more “delicious” and desirable and, of course, moving more product.
Now here’s where it gets tricky. Chemically speaking, high fructose corn syrup really isn’t that different from table sugar (sucrose). 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 from the 50/50 mix in plain old sugar.
But the problem is that it’s everywhere.
“The low cost of high fructose corn syrup allowed the explosion of 20-ounce sodas, super big gulps and the like to happen,” says C. Leigh Broadhurst, PhD, a research scientist and nutritionist at the USDA. “Because sucrose was quite expensive, for years, sodas were limited to the 12-ounce can. We have also had an explosion of candies, bakery items, and ice cream novelties, which would have been just too costly if they were all made with sugar. But now, because of high fructose corn syrup, these items are much cheaper to produce.”
So, no matter how you cut the HFCS-sweetened cake, we’re now consuming more fructose than ever. And refined fructose-—whether we get it from table sugar or from the ubiquitous HFCS—is bad news for your health.
When the Corn Refiners Assocation fights back with their “pro-HFCS” ads, it seems to come down to two arguments: One, it’s no worse than sugar (OK maybe, but that’s like saying Salems are no worse than Marlboros), and two, it’s natural because cause it’s made from corn.
It's slightly different chemically, but not enough to really matter.
It's a lot cheaper, so people can consume a lot more of it.
This is why European soft drink sizes are so small, and their restaurants tend to not have free refills. It would cost way too much otherwise.
Also explains why pastries and such in Europe taste different, not nearly as sweet.
http://naturalhealthsherpa.com/dirty-truth-high-fructose-corn-syrup/52786
Now in the “olden” days, sugar—table sugar that is, plain old sucrose—was expensive. Not maybe for the average Joe picking up a bag at the grocery store, but for food manufacturers wanting to sweeten products, it was definitely a high-ticket ingredient.
Between sugar tariffs that drove the price of sugar higher and corn subsidies the forced the price of corn lower, a perfect environment was setup to allow food manufacturers 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 voila, you had something that was even sweeter than sucrose at a fraction of the cost. Better yet, it could be added to virtually everything on the table, making those items even more “delicious” and desirable and, of course, moving more product.
Now here’s where it gets tricky. Chemically speaking, high fructose corn syrup really isn’t that different from table sugar (sucrose). 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 from the 50/50 mix in plain old sugar.
But the problem is that it’s everywhere.
“The low cost of high fructose corn syrup allowed the explosion of 20-ounce sodas, super big gulps and the like to happen,” says C. Leigh Broadhurst, PhD, a research scientist and nutritionist at the USDA. “Because sucrose was quite expensive, for years, sodas were limited to the 12-ounce can. We have also had an explosion of candies, bakery items, and ice cream novelties, which would have been just too costly if they were all made with sugar. But now, because of high fructose corn syrup, these items are much cheaper to produce.”
So, no matter how you cut the HFCS-sweetened cake, we’re now consuming more fructose than ever. And refined fructose-—whether we get it from table sugar or from the ubiquitous HFCS—is bad news for your health.
When the Corn Refiners Assocation fights back with their “pro-HFCS” ads, it seems to come down to two arguments: One, it’s no worse than sugar (OK maybe, but that’s like saying Salems are no worse than Marlboros), and two, it’s natural because cause it’s made from corn.