Myocardial Monday – HFCS

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Last week, Nonna asked about this, and rather than give the topic short shrift, I figured I’d cover it with heaping mounds of verbiage and ridiculous detail. So if you’re ready to learn, here we go:

What is it?
HFCS is a sweetener made from corn. It sounds strange; how do you make something sweet from corn, without it tasting like corn? It’s actually pretty simple.

Corn is mostly starch, and starch is just sugar wearing a fake nose and glasses. It only takes a bit of a nudge to turn the corn starch into the sweet stuff.

On a side note, “sugar” itself isn’t just one thing, but is the all-encompassing name for a group of similar molecules (“saccharides”) that taste sweet: fructose, glucose, lactose, maltose and a ton of other oses. Fructose is the sugar primarily found in fruits, lactose is the sugar that is in milk, and glucose is the sugar that your brain needs to function. That white crystal stuff that’s sitting in your sugar bowl is actually a double whammy (a “disaccharide”) of two sugars linked together: fructose and glucose. In this form it’s called “sucrose” – or table sugar.

Starch is what’s known to the chemistry geeks as a “polysaccharide”, or a big long chain of sugars. Think of it as a necklace made out of little sugar beads all strung together. To turn this pasty molecular chain into something yummy, the starch is “hydrolyzed” (this is the technical term for bonking something with water molecules) and the chain is effectively blasted apart. Before all the little beads end up clattering all over the floor of the Petri dish, they grab the hydrogen/oxygen pairs of the water molecules and change their name to glucose. Now, it’s sugar.

Then, to make it “go to eleven”, chemists take the resultant sugary goop and run it by some chemical workers called enzymes to force some of the glucose into becoming fructose. Thus, the corn syrup becomes richer in fructose, making it “high fructose” corn syrup. Get it?

Here’s a good place to note that your body can do this hydrolyzation thing without even breaking a sweat. This is why starchy food like potatoes and bread can really mess with your blood sugar level; the starches are converted into sugars by your digestive process.

Why is it in everything?
Not only can it make things taste better, it’s used to add volume, make bread softer, preserve food, assist with product fluid consistency and bump up calorie count. It’s the wonder additive that can work wonders. Better living through Science! Yup.

Why HFCS and not sugar?
HFCS is cheap. A whole lot cheaper that sugar. Why, you ask? Especially when sugar comes naturally and HFCS has to be made chemically? For that answer, you have to set the wayback machine to a few decades ago, and take a hard look at what our friends at Archer Daniels Midland have done. I won’t go into great detail here (you can read about it yourself), but suffice it to say that ADM (“Supermarket to the World”) lobbied the government to keep sugar prices high and make corn subsidies plentiful. They played games with the market so they’d come out ahead and could sell their uber-cheap HFCS to anyone who wanted it. And food manufacturers flocked to their door.

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup bad?
No, not on its own. It’s no worse than any other natural sweetener. It’s not going to destroy your liver or turn your skin into jelly, give you lyme disease, chronic fatigue, pigeon toes, rot your bowels or cause you to break out in weeping ulcers. It’s just sugar. The problem isn’t the stuff itself, it’s the abundance of the stuff.

It’s very hard to find any processed food that doesn’t contain HFCS. Go to the supermarket and read the ingredient labels on the foods you buy and you’ll see what I mean.

The HFCS promoters say “It’s fine in moderation.” Well, sure it is. But I challenge anyone to go through a day of normal eating given a typical American diet and end up having consumed HFCS in moderation. That’s like standing out in the rain all day and being told you’ll only get a little moist.

What to do about it?
Don’t stand in the rain. The food manufacturers have to provide an ingredients list, so take advantage of that fact. Stick to things that don’t use HFCS if at all possible. You’ll get enough sugar in the fruits and grains and starchy foods you eat.

It’s really not that hard, and you can actually lose weight without knocking a crumb of food out of your daily intake.