Posted on 05/12/2008 10:22:56 PM PDT by neverdem
Dr. John White is the founder & president of White Technical Research, a consulting firm serving the food and beverage industry for nearly 15 years. He has worked with high fructose corn syrup for more than 25 years, and his expertise has been quoted by numerous news outlets. Organizations such as the American Council on Science and Health in Washington, D.C., the Institute of Food Technologists in Atlanta, and most recently the Corn Refiners Association have turned to him and his expertise on the sweetener for answers. Now, QSR talks with him to set the record straight about the similarities and differences between sugar and the contested HFCS.
Can you explain how high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was developed? What was on the market before its creation? We’re going back into the 1970s. At that time sucrose was the dominant sweetener. It has a composition that is half fructose and half glucose. Those are two monosaccharides. In sucrose there’s a bond between them. So sucrose is called a disaccharide, but in composition it is half fructose and half glucose.
The other dominant or common caloric sweetener was honey, and it has roughly the same composition but is mostly monosaccharides. So it’s about half fructose and half glucose and its monosaccharous, so there’s no bond between them. So those were the two common caloric sweeteners at the time.
There was a little bit of fruit juice concentrate that also happens to have the same composition, half fructose, half glucose, depending on the fruit that is being concentrated.
So how did HFCS come into the picture? The driving force was twofold for the development of HFCS. One was that it was not always easy to use sucrose in food applications where you had to dissolve the sugar to use it in...
(Excerpt) Read more at qsrmagazine.com ...
Just want to say thank you for all your posts. They are very informative. Keep up the good work.
Ray
He must be eating too much HFCS and not enough glucose to come to that conclusion.
There is one - ONE - single fuel that brains cells need.
Glucose.
http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/carbs.html
Thanks for the link. I have been trying to avoid MSG as I have migraines and just started learning that a lack of MSG means less migraines for me.
-Cane sugar is the ultimate poison however.
Some white table sugars are as you say, contain both sucrose/glucose -
Some? Chemistry 101 is needed here.
White sugar is sucrose. It breaks down into fructose and glucose. Honey can be just about any combo of sucrose, glucose or fructose, depending on the floral source and the time the bees have to work it.
Beet sugar is sucrose after refinement.
Most natural sugars, including nectars, are sucrose.
There are just too many studies out on the health hazards of HFCS to promote it over sucrose.
bttt
Pure maple syrup is made from Maple tree sap. It’s very expensive and hard to come by in the USA.
FYI
Maple syrup is sold by producers on e-bay. You can buy it by the case in pint, quart and gallon cans. The cost is reasonable as you’ll use less because of its inherent sweetness. You can also find it for sale at various web sites.
And I am not trying to discount what I believe are real additional risks and dangers of HFCS. If anything, HFCS has made the use of sweeteners more prevalent because of convenience.
there is a reason some countries ban HFCS - wish we did -
And “ban” what after that, cigarettes, alcohol, firearms, automobiles?
There are a lot of things out there that hurt our health and cause death. Giving the government the power to start banning things is not the answer.
Voice your opinion through the free market. Buy something else.
By the way, the mere consumption of sugars does not cause diabetes in and by itself. High consumption of sugar combined with morbid obesity, lack of exercise, a trauma to the system, and, often, this combined with drug and/or alcohol abuse is the only correlation between sugar and diabetes.
I buy pure maple syrup at the grocery store. A bit more expensive but since there is nothing added, it is well worth the cost.
As long as it is pure maple syrup with no added ingredients, it’s completely natural.
Yummy.
“MSG is a poison. I am glad I am sensitive to it (migraines) so that I even KNOW about this. It is shocking how many “food” products are filled with it. I am so sorry I gave so many of them to my children, since the poisonous excitotoxins can have lasting effects on their nervous systems or chronic conditions later in life.”
I agree. My husband gets migraines too——one Dorito will do it :( I just wish labels told you it was in there-—we pretty much avoid anything in a box at this point.
In 1960s dollars? No way.
Go to the local mexican market and buy Coke that says Hecho in Mexico. It's made with real sugar.
Pure maple syrup isn't hard to find up here in slowly-thawing northern New England. Most of the stuff on store shelves comes from Canada, however.
It’s easy here in NE Ohio too. Just bought a gallon from my neighbor CHEAP!
Thanks for the link to MSG. I have had to figure that out myself by trial and error and a food chemical dictionary. I have book marked your link.
I’m not necessarily convinced either way.
Is is HFCS, or is it that the sweetener has become so prevalent in every food imaginable that we consume so much more? I’m sure in history, sweeteners were not so readily available that they were in just about every processed food. Which makes me think that’s the real problem - processed food. It’s cheap and far too easy to pick up something processed, compared to preparing a regular meal. It makes it easy to eat all the time, instead of eating for nutrition for the day’s work.
HFCS may be a culprit, but it may be more due to it’s availability as a sweetener than the makeup of the sweetener itself.
It also helps if your mother, grandmother(both sides) and great grandmother had Type 2 diabetes, as did my husbands.
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