Another reason to avoid HFCS

This is interesting:

>A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to High-Fructose Corn Syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise <in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.

Full article at:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/arch ... /91/22K07/

OK, I'd imagine that few diabetics still consume full-strength fizzy drunks, but HFCS is in lots of other things - the buns in fastfood burger places are full of it.

There are two linked experiments in the study, the second one showed as little as 6months with HFCS added to the diet is enough to cause symptoms of metabolic syndrome to appear.

mark.

hanadr said:

Chemically HFCS isn't very different from Sucrose.
Hana

Click to expand...

What interested me about the article is that there *is*, it now appears some significant difference between the two:

High-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are both compounds that contain the simple sugars fructose and glucose, but there at least two clear differences between them. First, sucrose is composed of equal amounts of the two simple sugars -- it is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose -- but the typical high-fructose corn syrup used in this study features a slightly imbalanced ratio, containing 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. Larger sugar molecules called higher saccharides make up the remaining 3 percent of the sweetener. Second, as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.


This second difference may go towards explaining why HFCS may be worse for us than conventional sugar.

Although, as you say, HFCS production in the EU is limited compared to the US, I wonder if there are restrictions limiting HFCS in imported foodstuffs?

The HFCS industry in the US seems to be a powerful lobbying force on government and have spent a lot of money on advertising denying that HFCS is any different to sugar - I wonder how they'll respond to this beyond these sets of ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbRxTOyGf0

mark