The Truth About High Fructose Corn Syrup - The Science Behind the Sweetener

QSR Magazine ^ | May 2008 | Blair Chancey

[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...

[HamiltonJay]

Good luck with that... you want real sugar in your food anymore, you better make it yourself.

Especially when you want to talk soda/pop... there is only one company I know that uses 100% cane sugar to sweeten its product, and its a small regional outlet based in Natrona Heights, PA. There may be some others, but they are few and far between.

HFCS is in EVERYTHING... I can’t recall picking up and reading the label of ANYTHING sweet, that did not have this as an ingredient.

[bitterohiogunclinger]

“I think that it is in the HFCS supporter’s court to show that there really is NO correlation between its product and our sugar related difficulties, since NONE of them were evident until HFCS took over from cane/beet sugar (sucrose)”
I guess there were no diabetics before the invention of HFCS?
Bullsh*t.
The predominant scientific theory is that juvenile diabetes predominately results from viral attack of the pancreas. Many forms of adult onset diabetes are brought on by obesity, that is true, but there is much more contributing to obesity than a single dietary ingredient. Primarily, the eating habits of our society have changed greatly since the 1960’s, with the higher consumption of convenience foods and incredible amount of highly processed foods. White bread, white sugar, two dozen unpronounceable preservatives, colorings and flavor enhancers. Every single item has been demonized at one time or the other with little scientific scrutiny. The overall picture being missed is, we are eating more junk food, and spending too much time being lazy.