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 ...
Fructose, insulin resistance, and metabolic dyslipidemia
Fructose consumption as a risk factor for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
BACKGROUND/AIMS: While the rise in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) parallels the increase in obesity and diabetes, a significant increase in dietary fructose consumption in industrialized countries has also occurred. The increased consumption of high fructose corn syrup, primarily in the form of soft drinks, is linked with complications of the insulin resistance syndrome. Furthermore, the hepatic metabolism of fructose favors de novo lipogenesis and ATP depletion. We hypothesize that increased fructose consumption contributes to the development of NAFLD. METHODS: A dietary history and paired serum and liver tissue were obtained from patients with evidence of biopsy-proven NAFLD (n=49) without cirrhosis and controls (n=24) matched for gender, age (+/-5 years), and body mass index (+/-3 points). RESULTS: Consumption of fructose in patients with NAFLD was nearly 2- to 3-fold higher than controls [365kcal vs 170kcal (p<0.05)]. In patients with NAFLD (n=6), hepatic mRNA expression of fructokinase (KHK), an important enzyme for fructose metabolism, and fatty acid synthase, an important enzyme for lipogenesis were increased (p=0.04 and p=0.02, respectively). In an AML hepatocyte cell line, fructose resulted in dose-dependent increase in KHK protein and activity. CONCLUSIONS: The pathogenic mechanism underlying the development of NAFLD may be associated with excessive dietary fructose consumption.
Great Post. Thanks.
I am a compulsive label reader, have been for decades.
Some of the things I look for most often are MSG; high in sodium; HFCS; and long strings of unintelligible additives. If I can’t pronounce it then I don’t want to eat it.
We are now eating more fresh vegetables, salads, brown rice, and broiled, poached, or grilled beef, chicken, and fish - all cooked sodium free with little or no added fat. I use canola or olive oil and we rarely drink hard liguor, instead sipping a small glass of wine with our evening meal.
I suspect we’ll all live longer. Now, if I can only get my teenager away from fried bean burritos!
It’s getting very hard to buy many kinds of foods without HFCS. That and partially hydrogenated oil are ubiquitous.
The horrible significance of HFCS is almost beyond the scope of normal human consciousness. It is my assumption that most of the metabolic-related degenerative diseases (heart disease, solid tumor cancers, strokes, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, MS, and many others all share a common causation in the form of iron over-load (which is exascerbated by HFCS).
BUMP
HFCS is no less dangerous than MSG.
We consumers MUST use our purchasing power to inform the USDA, Kraft, Pepsico, CocaCola, etc that we want REAL, CANE sugar in our foodstuffs!
Key words there.
Fructose is by far a healthier sweetener than refined white sugar. (glucose) which is the real monster behind diseases like diabetes.
Of course, anything in excess isn't healthy for you, doesn't matter what it is. Too much water can kill you.
We are fortunate today to have the Internet for research. We are otherwise pretty much on our own to determine safety in our foods.
I drink very little soda these days, and then only the brands Jones, from Canada, or Polar Classics from the USA, both bottled only in glass and with sugar.
I read labels of everything and won't touch anything with HFCS.
Even the FDA, which is normally in bed with the chemical companies that now make the ingredients our foods are riddled with, says “Products containing high fructose corn syrup cannot be considered ‘natural’ and should not be labeled as such, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said. “
But if the truth and wide spread warnings follow the norm, it will be another 20 years, and many ill-effected lives, before anything is done to curb it...or until the chemical moguls come up with another profitable chemical...
Sucrose is split to fructose and glucose. Glucose is used directly by the body, but is implicated in Type II diabetes and other protein-sugar related diseases. Fructose has to be metabolized by the liver, going into several energy pathways. Too much of that can overload your liver, and too much of some of the downstream radicals might cause other problems.
Don't drink too much alcohol, either, although fructose primes the enzyme pathway to metabolize ethanol. Drink fruity cocktails!
High fructose corn syrup used in most foods is about 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Sucrose (cane sugar) is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. The only difference is the rate of absorption.
I personally think you’re out of your mind regarding sucrose v HFCS.
To put it simply: the human race has consumed sugar (sucrose) for literally THOUSANDS of years, with only a few unfortunate souls being subject to the ravages of diabetes.
Now, today, we have literally millions of children who are insulin dependant. There are millions of adults who have DEVELOPED insulin dependant diabetes SINCE the advent of HFCS as the primary sweetener in commercial food products.
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).
Thank you for the great post!
Useful & needed information.
It's a good practice to NOT add salt when cooking. I've always cooked that was as well, and don't miss it at all. There is enough salt present naturally in foods to meet your bodies needs.
As far as cooking oil goes, even olive oil in excess isn't good for you, and can be just as bad as any other cooking oil if heated.
It is the over heating of cooking oils which turns them into saturated trans fats, so even though canola oil says it's trans fat acid free, soon as you turn your deep fryer on and heat it up to 375 to cook those fries or chicken, you begin changing it into a trans fatty acid chain. Change your deep fryer oil after every use if you really want to minimize your trans fat intake on those occasional deep fried foods. They more you use it, the higher in transfatty acid it becomes.
corn, vegetable and peanut oil is really the best oil to use in a deep fryer, but it's more expensive, especially if you change it after every use.
There's nothing tastier than a deep fried turkey in peanut oil, but it will cost you.
Everything in moderation, and you'll live a long time.
“Exactly - there is a reason some countries ban HFCS - wish we did - but the criteria is not what a substance will do to the consumer but how will it make money for the producer...”
(Awaits arrival of free-choicers/govt. has not right to ban crowd)
This is one of the few very useful applications of govt. if you ask me, especially as there are plenty of available and affordable alternatives out there.
"Ellis: No. … Of course, you know that that abundance of cheap corn benefits the HFCS industry. The reason that industry is so successful is they’re able to sweeten things much less expensively than sugar. The reason they’re able to do that largely is because the raw material in HFCS is incredibly cheap. Our one acre of corn could have sweetened 57,000 cans of soda. We grew 10,000 pounds of corn and it took us about two hours of labor and a couple hundred dollars of input and that’s just incredible. That’s unbelievably cheap, and the reason it’s so cheap is that the subsidies system keeps everybody there growing corn. "
Table sugar is the disaccharide sucrose which is hydrolyzed to glucose and fructose. Check the second link in comment# 1, Fructose, insulin resistance, and metabolic dyslipidemia. Scroll way down to "Figure 2 Hepatic fructose metabolism: A highly lipogenic pathway." Enlarge it. Fructose is quickly metabolized into the glycerine, aka glycerol, spine of triglycerides.
I used to think glucose and fructose were essentially the same. Don't feel bad. My major in college was chemistry with a course in biochem and a research course in biochem during another semester, besides what I took in med school.
White refined sugar (white death) is the worst thing there is.
Even nuclear waste decays faster than refined white sugar. Even though your body does absorb it, you deplete your bodies calcium, minerals, vitamins and amino acids doing so, and weakens your imune system.
It is the bad part of corn syrop. For that reason, corn sugar/syrop is only half as bad as white sugar.
Pure fructose should always be your first choice of sweetener, it is the natural sweetener found in fruits.
http://naturalmedicine.suite101.com/article.cfm/sugars__the_bad
The Internet is such a great multicultural and diverse tool for research nowadays, that you can find support for whatever position that you can dream of taking.
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