Thursday, April 30, 2009
HFC
Slate article about high fructose corn syrup. The part I was surprised by is that sugar contains almost as much fructose as high fructose corn syrup. Does that sound right to the medical crowd reading this? I used to think HFC is worse for you than regular sugar, but this is making me question that.
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So I haven't read the article yet. I'm of the belief that HFCS is bad because it's turned us into a country of obese sugar-addicts... it was cheap to make, so they put it in everything, and now we like everything sweet. The bottom line is: we shouldn't just be eating less HFCS, we should be eating less sugar, period. Replacing HFCS with sucrose isn't the answer.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, there's also a bunch of nuanced differences between fructose & glucose uptake in the gut as well as between their involvement in energy metabolism/catabolism... essentially, fructose bypasses a lot of mechanisms that our bodies use to regulate energy storage (ie fat).
Also, HFCS 55 is 55% fructose 45% glucose, while sucrose (table sugar) is 50%/50%. So it's pretty similar... but when you add up that extra 5% in terms of the amount of HFCS that there is in everything that everyone eats in this country, it's a lot. If you were to go into a business partnership, 50/50 would be even, and 55/45 wouldn't feel like 'almost as much' when we're talking thousands of dollars...