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This article is #10 of the 12 most popular posts on Skeptical Raptor during 2015. Stay tuned, I’ll be reposting the rest of them through New Year’s Day.
One of the most frustrating things I’ve observed in nearly six years of writing (here and in other locations), is that those who want to create a negative myth about a new technology (especially in food or medicine), one of the best ways to do it is mention “chemicals.”
And if the chemical sounds unnatural, the assumption is that it is unsafe. The has made a lot of money endorsing a belief that all chemicals are evil, ignoring the fact that all life, the air, and water are made of chemicals.
There is one more crucial point to note about these sugars, which will be important as we move along with this story. Fructose is despite having the same exact caloric content. So technically, you could use about 58% less fructose than sucrose to get the same sweetness. You’re probably seeing where this is going, but stay tuned.
All individual sugars are the same across the planet. Glucose, fructose, galactose or ribose, whether produced by a plant, an animal, a bacteria, or a manufacturing plant in Iowa, are exactly the same molecule. Fructose is fructose is fructose, no matter the source.
I want to make this clear. There is simply no difference between the fructose and glucose in HFCS, and the fructose and glucose in sucrose, the disaccharide derived from cane 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.
I cannot repeat this enough, so I will. The components of sucrose from a sugar beet or sugar cane is chemically and scientifically identical to HFCS. Neither is more or less “natural” than the other.
This is one of the major misconceptions of the pseudoscience of the natural food world, that somehow a sugar from a living organism is magically different from a sugar from a manufacturing plant.
No organism’s physiology could distinguish between the fructose and glucose in HFCS from the fructose and glucose in cane sugar .All organisms, including humans, biologically metabolizes each fructose and glucose in relatively the same way. We should not endow HFCS with some special properties that it simply does not have.
consists of 24% water, and the rest fructose and glucose–the water just makes the fructose and glucose into a syrup. That’s it, nothing more than fructose, glucose and water, no different than all of the other fructose, glucose and water molecules made into a syrup.
More science below, you can skip unless you’re just like me, obsessed with information:
First, high fructose corn syrup is much cheaper than sucrose (table sugar), but it’s more sweet because it has a lower glucose to fructose ratio than sucrose (and as we mentioned, fructose is very sweet). Second, it retained moisture better than sucrose (twice as many molecules). Third, it was available in a liquid form and didn’t caramelize as readily as sucrose (this last one could be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use).
But here’s the most important point: HFCS allowed soda manufacturers to use less sugar — and thus fewer calories — in their products without reducing its sweetness. Using sucrose, sugar from cane or beets, would require 20% more sugar (along with 20% more sugar calories) than using HFCS.
In other words, some of these “natural” foods have as high or even higher levels of fructose than HFCS. And since we’ve established that fructose is fructose, no matter the source, consuming these foods will provide you more fructose than an equivalent amount of HFCS.
Now the answer gets much more complicated, and frankly, we’ve got to go to some more esoteric science. Remember, because the food manufacturers are using less HFCS to get the same sweetness as sucrose, the amount of fructose consumed between a drink that contains just sucrose and one that contains just HFCS (and has the same sweetness level) is almost the same.
In other words, you’re getting the same amount of taste (because of the fructose), but consuming fewer calories, and the same amount of fructose as you would from sucrose. So your worries shouldn’t be about the fructose.
Moreover, strong scientific meta-reviews of clinical research have established that there is little evidence of links between increased fructose intake and any deleterious health effects:
So, let’s review. Fructose is just a monosaccharide that is metabolized by the body. It is sweeter than other mono- and disaccharides, so less is needed, a lot less. HFCS is just a natural corn syrup with a higher fructose to glucose ratio to make it taste sweeter, so less is needed for the same sweetness.
Most naturally sweet products also have high fructose contents, hence their high sweet tastes. And from scientific reviews, there is no evidence that fructose has any effect on obesity or metabolic disease beyond what is expected from the consumption of any other sugar.
The reasons that have lead scientists to speculate about the link between HFCS and diabetes is a result of how galactose, fructose and glucose are treated differently by human metabolism. Glucose passes through the liver unchanged, and can be used by all cells for energy. The level of glucose is controlled by insulin, which causes it to be stored if the blood levels get high, and glucagon, another hormone which causes the release of glucose from storage. This control system is highly complicated, and in non-diabetics, is a finely tuned system.
Fructose and galactose don’t signal insulin, but are captured by the liver, eventually processed into a couple of different biochemicals, one of which is glucose. So, because fructose is treated in a different manner by the body, . How the body controls blood sugar levels, and how fructose and galactose are involved in that control, is incredibly complex and would take at least a year of graduate level classwork to even begin to understand the physiology.
Except, there are some problems with this speculation about 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.
There are a few very poorly done studies () which seem to claim that high fructose in the diet may lead to more hunger (possibly because it doesn’t trigger the feedback loops for hunger that glucose does). These studies But these studies completely ignore the fact that rarely is fructose is consume alone, but usually with glucose, which will trigger the hunger-fullness feedback loops.
However, I admit to vastly oversimplifying how these sugars interact in the complex blood sugar regulation system. 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.
A lot of the current “mania” about HFCS and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) results from a recent article in an open source journal, Global Public Health ( of 0.92), by Goran et al. The authors tried to .
This type of study is at the population level, which may seem like it would give you great numbers; unfortunately, the problem is that it allowed so many confounding factors to be included (dietary patterns, quality and quantity of food, smoking, drinking, anything), while it ignored all sorts of other data that might provided us with a clear indication of causality. In other words, it is simply not a way to establish correlation, let alone causation.
There is a “movement” to push real (read cane) sugar back into many of our foods. So called real sugar sodas that use cane sugar instead of HFCS are popular, and more expensive.
The problem with cane sugar is that it’s bad for the environment. . Large portions of the , the largest tropical wetland in the USA, have been drained for sugar cane plantations. The fertilizers used on vegetables, along with high concentrations of and that are the byproduct of decayed soil necessary for sugarcane production, were pumped into WCAs south of the EAA. The introduction of large amounts of these chemicals provided opportunities for exotic plants to take hold in the Everglades.
One can argue that corn farming has some of the same issues, but HFCS is a tiny portion of corn farming. Getting table sugar is almost the only reason to grow cane sugar.
Nevertheless, if we switched more to HFCS and other sugar sources, this can reduce the push for more cane sugar fields, which will have a major impact the health of the planet, especially in tropical areas.
It’s clear that there are individuals want to “prove” that high fructose corn syrup is unsafe and causes all sorts of problems to humans. But HFCS is a sugar syrup, close to honey in ratio of fructose to glucose. Just because it has this scary chemical name, high fructose corn syrup, people must think that it’s made up of some evil fructose chemical. But all fructose molecules are exactly the same, whether it’s in honey, a fruit, maple syrup, cane sugar, or HFCS.
In case you skipped all that boring science above, here’s the basic information.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in June 2014. It has been completely revised and updated to include more comprehensive information, to improve readability and to add current research.
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