Posted on 05/22/2011 11:11:23 AM PDT by DannyTN
Good points.
I posted my clear recollection of an article announcing research findings about a year ago. My recollection be mistaken, though I am fairly sure I recalled by the research design and results as reported in that article correctly. The fact I cannot find working links to the study (maybe not surprising if it is forthcoming in The Journal of Hepatology as the online content referring to the study most like the one I recall suggest), does not make my posting “false propaganda”.
The word “may” should have been inserted before the word “be” in my reply. (That’s what I get for editing my own post for bevity. The longer version I had shortly before hitting send was worded correctly.)
HFCS is about 22% worse than sucrose. Both of them are bad.
Sucrose breaks down pretty readily into glucose and fructose so availability doesn’t make sucrose any better. The biggest problem is that both of them hit the blood stream pretty quickly after consumption and enter at a rate difficult to find in any natural food. That spike in blood sugar is hard on the body, as the body can’t use that much energy all at once, so it gets converted into triglycerides.
The only thing that makes HFCS worse than sucrose is the slightly higher concentration of fructose. Fructose being metabolized only in the liver means the rate and the quantity hitting the blood stream stresses the liver and disrupts how the liver does it’s many other jobs- including the regulation of cholesterol.
What make the fructose in HFCS and sucrose different from natural sources it that the fructose is typically bound up with fiber. The fiber slows the release of the fructose into the blood stream and also helps the liver clean up the toxins from breaking the fructose down. Fiber is critical to our function yet very few of us get anywhere near enough. By extension, fruit juice is just as bad as soft drinks since the sugars are floating free, without the fiber in concentrations not found in whole fruit.
Fructose comes in all your fruit. Bound up with fiber, your body is very capable of handling it. I would agree that we really should avoid fructose in processed foods but consumed in whole fruit fructose is OK.
"was" should be inserted in place of "may be" ....
I'm more concerned about the stuff in HFCS that is not sugar, than I am about the relative mix of fructose to sucrose. The trace amount of mercury, the other chemicals identified on the spectragraph, and there is also a particle that has been found in the blood of diabetics that is found in HFCS, but I've lost the link on it.
The bodies absorption of sugar is independent of the dietary source. It is regulated by active transport on the surface of the small intestines.
What make the fructose in HFCS and sucrose different from natural sources it that the fructose is typically bound up with fiber.
The disaccharides and the polysaccharides are different entities. They are separated before they reach the intestines.
The fiber slows the release of the fructose into the blood stream
Fructose doesn't go into the blood stream. Where do you alarmists come up with this nonsense?
The IATP study that found mercury in products using HFCS was, like so many others, seriously flawed. They never employed a control group so we really have no idea whether the mercury came from the HFCS or something else.
The highest concentration of mercury found was measured at 350 ppt - that's parts per trillion. Measuring in picograms is just plain silly. There is nothing to be worried about when an element is found in quantities in less than 400 parts per trillion. Good grief, you can find mercury in drinking water at 500 ppt and no one is running and screaming into the night about it.
As a matter of fact, higher concentrations of mercury can be found in many fruits and vegetables. Canned mushrooms were found to contain mercury - at least in one test - at 5,000 - 15,000 parts per trillion. Scary. You're probably exposed to thousands of times more mercury when you screw a fluorescent light bulb into a socket.
The compounds you are not remembering are called a reactive carbonyls. These carbonyls are found at high levels in the blood of diabetics. They are also found in drinks sweetened with HFCS. The guy conducting this reasearch (Dr. Ho @ Rutgers) is a top shelf researcher so there may be something to this. Or it may be much ado about nothing.
I don't even bother getting into the specifics anymore, this whole thing is obviously another boogeyman hunt. What is most telling, for me, is the fact that sucrose is so similar to HFCS, and all the ills attributed to HFCS can be attributed to sucrose (table sugar), but they don't say a damn thing about it.. AT least the low-carb fanatics are consistent...
My google alert for HFCS picked up your article.
Thank you for this informative article. I am so tired of reading articles that claim that HFCS=sugar just because the AMA says that they both contribute to obesity, and “once absorbed in to the bloodstream” are the same. (ADA). I firmly believe that the introduction of HFCS into our food supply has been a major contributor to our current health woes.
Now some specifics. The unknown “blip” that Dr. Hyman referred to in the GLC analysis of HFCS may be mold.
In my cybertravels I had come across a woman who is so allergic to corn that she cannot even walk by it in a supermarket. Not only can she not eat corn, drink HFCS-sweetened beverages, or eat any corn derived additive, she cannot take prescriptive medicine that uses cornstarch filler. The only substance that could ignite a rxn like that would be mold. If you go to ADM’s or Cargills product sheets you will see that there is mold (mycotoxin) contaminant present. It’s reported as “less than -—” but that just means they couldn’t remove it completely. Incidentally the woman I am referring to can drink Mexican
Coke made with real sugar. So much for the purity of HFCS.
Also, if you go back to the original literature about HFCS, you will note that HFCS-42 was given a sweetness rating of
100 = sucrose. In those early days, millions of dollars had been spent on outfitting their factories to enzymatically convert glucose to fructose. It was essesntial, therefore, to find the lowest fructose% that mimicked sugar. However, according to one retired corn refiner, HFCS-42 gummed up the works and it took too much energy to pump the stuff out. So the production engineers came up with a brilliant idea....add more fructose. Fructose is the more moisture retaining of the two simple sugars, glucose and fructose, and boosting the %fructose to HFCS-55 solved their problem. So they added 55/42 = 30% more fructose to keep their pipes running smoothly. Little did they know that variant HFCS-55 would start clogging our livers and arteries. Now the CRA claims that HFCS-55 has a rating of 100 = sucrose. That is patently deceptive.
The CRA has by design perverted the ratio of fructose: glucose in HFCS. ADM makes Cornsweet90, which is
HFCS-90. This extremely sweet industrial sweetener is used for low-cal, low fat foods. Why? Because the food manufacturer can impart the same sweetness with half the calories. Sounds like a caloric bargain until you realize that your liver is receiving a bolus of fructose it doesn’t need. Btw: ADM has removed the product sheet on Cornsweet90 ever since I starting spreading this info.
Cynthia Papierniak, M.S.
What utter nonsense. "Less than" on a product spec sheet means that the entity being tested for was not detectable by the test method employed. It doesn't mean that the entity being tested for was ever there in the first place, or not for that matter, simply that it was undetectable.
There will be a spec for heavy metals for example. The spec will be "less than X ppm". That doesn't mean that the material contains heavy metals at X-1 ppm. It means that the limit of detection is X ppm and the test result came back negative.
Your fanciful description of the development of HFCS is equally twisted but not worth a response.
Welcome to Free Republic.
Interesting stuff Cynthia. Thanks for sharing this information.
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