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 ...
I see so many parents handing out goldfish crackers and the like to their babies, thinking that they are giving them some kind of food/snack, and not absolute poison.
99% of crackers, soups, packaged rice dishes, etc. contain it.
Here is a link giving some of the most known euphemisms, as MSG hides under MANY names. http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html
Other than what they ate in fruit and vegetables. From forever.
Thanks for the information.
Must be doing something right - I’ve never owned a deep fat fryer, mainly because I don’t like fried food. My kid buys his fried burritos at Taco Time, near the local high school (naturally). It is his once-a-week treat!
If that was from the economics section of the original article, that's the one I didn't read.
Are you saying that there were no evidence of diabetes before HFCS? Thats the way I read your statement above.
Yes, it was, "The Economics of Corn", page 6.
Corn no longer is cheap, as it’s being subsidized for ethanol production!
Cane sugar is the ultimate poison however.
Some white table sugars are as you say, contain both sucrose/glucose and fructose because the plant they are are refined from contain them as well. (beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips, onions).
Honey, tree fruits, melons, berries etc. also contain amounts of glucose/ sucrose, but are mostly fructose. Generally they are considered healthy, unless of course you over indulge, like anything else.
I agree with that, and in addition to that, the scarcity is possibly causing increases in the prices of other basic foods.
Prior to that, tooth decay wasn't much of a problem either.
Another little article from Mr. Ian Cheney; I’ll look for the other guy in a second:
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/01_07/comment.html
I’d like to ask Ian if he sold his corn crop by the “pound”...what an idiot.
I misspoke, as I meant that the sugar problems so evident today were much rarer when we DIDN’T use HFCS. Both diabetes and obesity were quite UNcommon then, yet today these unfortunate maladies are running rampant.
Thank you for bringing my erroneous wording to my attention. I really MUST remember to be far more clear in my opinions and assertions.
Thank you again, and good night.
Uh, no. The consumed natural sugars (fructose), mostly from fruits. Cane sugar (sucrose) is a relatively "new" development which came along with sugar cane plantations. That's when problems began.
I agree with that, and in addition to that, the scarcity is possibly causing increases in the prices of other basic foods.
Then you'd be wrong. Two different types of corn are used for ethanol and human foods.
The corn used for ethanol is an animal feed type, which is indigestible for humans. The starch removed from that corn is then converted to sugars which are then used for ethanol. The rest of the corn goes on to be used for animal feed, so if anything, increased ethanol production also results in increased animal feed production.
The human variety of corn is an entirely different type of corn, and only represents less than 1% of corn grown in the USA. THAT corn is and continues to be the corn used to make corn syrop and other goods for human consumption.
While increased ethanol production MAY result in commodity price increases, the main factor in commodity price increases to date are the increased fuel and fertilizer costs. Fuel has doubled and fertilizer has tripled in costs over last year.
As far as commodity prices go, those minor increases have LITTLE effect on food prices. Take wheat prices for example. Wheat has gone from 4 - to about 8$ a bushel. One bushel of wheat makes about 90 loafs of bread. That's about 10 cents a loaf. Gee, something ELSE must be driving up the costs of bread.
In the 60's wheat sold for closer to 14 dollars a bushel. Yet bread only cost the consumer about 10 cents a loaf. Why is that? Must be something else that effects food prices, like the high costs of GASOLINE perhaps?
Frankly, I have no problem with folks questioning the use of HFCS; I do have a problem with the opinions of a little Yale "greenie" being given any type of serious consideration.
The idea that they grew 10,000 pounds (LOL) of corn, and are considered "experts" is simply offensive.
I’m curious . . . what about maple syrup? What kind of sugar is that? (I just bought a bottle — had a crazving for pancakes.)
That comment defies logic.
If it's being subsidized, then it would be even cheaper.
Subsidies cause commodity prices to remain artificially low. I'd rather commodity prices reflect the actual cost plus profit of growing a crop and stop this government give away of billions of taxpayers dollars to supply the markets (and thus oil rich turd world countries) with cheap commodities.
Mono-sodium glutamate.
I never said it wasn’t a processed additive, only that it’s made from a simple -single- salt. The reason for this is because it tastes less salty, not that it is any better or good for you.
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