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I know that 90% of my articles are about vaccines. I know that I’ve shown over and over again that vaccines are effective and about as safe as anything in medicine. And I know that vaccines don’t cause autism. Obviously, I never have to write another article about vaccines. Hah.
OK, it’s never going to happen.
So let’s talk about beer. Everyone loves beer. Maybe not everyone, but good beer can be really good.
The arrogantly named food blogger, (real name–Vani Hari), who passes along anecdotes like they were real data, and who invents pseudoscience faster than a homeopath, . She’s gone after the breweries for adding GMO grains (who cares, ), coloring, and that evil chemical, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). She never quite explains what she has against HFCS, but based on her amateurish and unscientific review of food ingredients, it’s obvious that she thinks that HFCS is an “evil chemical” and must not be consumed. If someone named it “extra sweet corn syrup,” it’s quite possible she would have ignored it.
I’m also offended by her referring to herself as the “Food Babe.” When “babe” is used as a self-descriptor by a woman, it negates any other characteristic that woman has. It implies that the important reason to listen to her drivel (and it would still be drivel) is because she’s attractive. “Babe” promulgates a sexist attitude, a perspective that needs to be changed. The “Food Babe” may have something important to say, but arrogantly referring to one’s self as “babe.” That’s offensive on so many levels.
Give anything a chemical name, and panic ensues. MSG, or monosodium glutamate, is . Being sensitive or allergic to MSG is so ridiculous–you’d be allergic or sensitive to every single protein in your body then. It’s one of the dumbest food fads on the planet, and there are plenty from which to choose!
Let’s talk about HFCS and beer. Doesn’t really matter if it’s beer or soda or your favorite chocolate candy, but she went after beer. And like anything written by any pseudoscience pushing blowhard, I’m going to take down her junk science.
Let’s start with some…real science.
For a real detailed explanation of the science of sugars, specifically HFCS, . Really, read about the science of sugars, it’s important to this story. I’ll summarize here.
There are over 20 naturally occurring simple sugars, called monosaccharides, found on this planet. All but four have any significant role in human nutrition: , , , and . Those are the only four sugars that can be absorbed by the gut and used by the human body.
But things never are that simple. Many sugars we consume are disaccharides, or two simple sugars bound together. For example, table sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide made of one molecule of glucose bound to one molecule of fructose. When you consume sucrose, it is broken down rather easily into one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose, before your body can absorb it. This is not complicated, and it’s not anything magical, it just how it is.
Sucrose has a unique taste that is found in brown sugar, molasses, beet sugar, and maple syrup–lots of places. In each of those, the sucrose is the same, and other “contaminants” give it different flavors, like the different “chemicals” that give maple its flavor. There are other common disaccharides that we eat, like lactose or milk sugar, which is glucose and galactose; maltose which is two glucose molecules; and a few dozen less common ones. Each disaccharide has a slightly different taste profile in pure form, and some rare disaccharides provide unique tastes to certain fruits and vegetables. But when these disaccharides enter the intestinal tract, they are quickly disassociated by water or acids plus enzymes into simple monosaccharides.
To the body, whatever type of sugar you consume, in whatever form, and in whatever food, to be absorbed, it must be broken down to glucose, fructose, galactose, and very rarely, ribose.
Therefore, if you read some bogus pseudoscience that this sugar or that sugar is better or worse for you, they all break down into simple monosaccharides, only four, just four, matter to human health. And the chemical structure of glucose, fructose, galactose, and ribose are exactly the same if they are in a pear, a bag of white sugar, manufactured in a chemical factory, or lovingly harvested from the nectar of a rare flower growing the headwaters of the Amazon.
In other words, some of these “natural” foods have as high, or, in the case of apples, peaches and pears, even higher levels of fructose than HFCS. Remember, fructose is fructose. There is no chemical difference between the fructose created by plants or created by corn. It’s the same exact fructose molecule. The body thinks it’s the same. The body metabolizes it in the same way. To any organism in the world that can metabolize fructose (I don’t know if there are any that can’t, but I’m not sure), fructose is fructose is fructose is fructose.
I hope that’s clear. There is simply no difference between the fructose and glucose in HFCS, and the fructose and glucose in table sugar. The chemical formulas are exactly the same. It’s the exact same carbons, the exact same hydrogens, and the exact same oxygens. No difference. It does not matter where you find the fructose or glucose, they’re all the same.
Let’s go to some real medicine.
Even though there really is simply little difference between various sugars that are eaten by humans, even though “high fructose” is sweeter and therefore less sugar is used, and even though all fructose is exactly the same, there is a continuing fear about fructose. Somehow, fructose is evil. It’s dangerous. It kills.
So from a medical point of view, is there anything there? The evidence is either extremely weak or even nonexistent, , to support a hypothesis that the consumption of HFCS has any deleterious health effect:
So, there really is nothing there. Based on these meta reviews, the scientific community is coming to a consensus that HFCS is fairly safe. Now, don’t misinterpret this data. It doesn’t mean you can go drink a liter of pure HFCS every day and have no consequences. Because there are.
HFCS causes diabetes?
, no not really, HFCS is not correlated to diabetes. Some people have speculated that there could be a link between HFCS and (T2DM), a metabolic disorder generally thought to be caused by lifestyle issues such as obesity.
As some background, the basic monosaccharides, galactose, fructose, and glucose, are each metabolized in a different pathway by humans. Glucose is processed through the liver, but remains unchanged, and is used by all cells in the body for energy purposes. The level of glucose is controlled by the hormone insulin, which induces cells to store glucose if blood levels get high, and glucagon, another hormone critical to blood glucose levels, is released when blood sugar levels drop, inducing cells to glucose from storage. This control system is highly complicated, and as long as an individual is not diabetic, the blood glucose level remains finely tuned over 24 hours. It’s actually an amazing system, with highly interesting evolutionary history. Nearly the same insulin floating in our body can be found in the simplest animals, including insects and crustaceans.
On the other hand, fructose and galactose don’t signal insulin. However, those two sugars are captured by the liver, eventually converted into a couple of different biochemicals, one of which is glucose. See this is an extraordinary complex system, which people oversimplify.
Because fructose is metabolized differently, there has been some . Except, there are some problems with this view linking fructose and T2DM. For example, Because fructose is 1.73X sweeter than sucrose, diabetics can consume significantly less fructose (than other forms of sugars) for an equivalent level of sweetness. . In other words, specifically because of the sweetness and lower insulin reactivity, fructose may actually be preferred for those who are attempting a low glycemic index diet.
Now, I am oversimplifying how all of these sugars interact in human physiology. It would take a 1000 page book to scratch the surface. However, there is just not any convincing and plausible evidence that shows fructose, as opposed to all other monosaccharides, has some specific and unique effect on human metabolism.
High quality meta reviews of the have shown no consistent and clinically significant relationship between the consumption of fructose and any metabolic disease. We could a few , but they don’t provide us with convincing evidence of a link. We do have evidence that any sugar can lead to obesity, whether it’s from maple syrup, HFCS, table sugar, or your local ice cream shop.
So the Food Babe is wrong?
About beer she is. HFCS in your beer is not going to do anything. Maybe if you’re some aficionado, and can tell me, through blind testing, that an HFCS containing beer tastes differently than a non-HFCS, I could accept that (though probably not, because I think blind tastings are bogus). And I guess there could be some flavor difference.
As far as I can tell, the Food Babe gets upset about any strange chemical name, because, she lacks an education in chemical names and what they are and they aren’t. She recently had a fit about , based on her arrogant and ignorant understanding of “chemicals.” She thinks that every chemical is horrible, yet our world is made of nothing BUT chemicals. If she really wanted to do this, why doesn’t she analyze all of the chemicals in coffee itself! Hey it contains a crystalline xanthine alkaloid, methyltheobromine.
Oh wait, that’s caffeine!
The Food Babe is simply inventing things as she writes, just to get hits and to feed what appears to be her enormous ego. Maybe she does have a useful message that drinking a kale smoothie is better and cheaper than a Starbucks’ drink, but it should be about the calories or cost, not about some mysterious chemical. The Food Babe is solidly unknowledgeable about actual physiological effects of these chemicals.
As for beer, I never check labels. I know if it tastes good or not, based on my previous experience. And I don’t like warm beer.
Who cares if it contains HFCS, unless it made it taste terrible. Then we should protest. Nevertheless, it probably will still taste better than a kale smoothie.
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