1.05.2007

High Fructose Corn Syrup

Kind of out of character for this place but I spend some time looking into the whole high fructose corn syrup craze. For some reason in the last year or two fructose has become the "evil food de jouier" (pardon my french!) and high fructose corn syrup has been dragged along with it. In anycase, I hope it is helpful.

I looked into the fructose thing and it seems that it is both good and bad. It is good in the sense that unlike glucose it takes a significant amount of time to be metabolized so that it doesn't stress your pancreas as much. In this sense it may help prevent diabetes but is has the very real benefit of providing a more even energy source then glucose alone. You may have heard of the Glycemic Index of food, it rates the rise in blood sugar immediately after eating that food. Low GI food is supposedly less of a shock to ones system since it is metabolized more slowly. The real benefit of a low GI diet is supposedly in balancing ones energy and mood throughout the day although I have never had the patience to test this out.

Whats funny is that Sucrose (table sugar or cane sugar) is broken down in the intestine into one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose and most commercially available sources of high fructose corn syrup also have roughly a 50/50 ratio of fructose to glucose. The higher concentrations require greater processing so are more expensive and since the chief reason for using HFCS is price... your probably not going to get the 90% pure stuff. The end result is most high fructose corn syrup that you eat is no more dangerous then table sugar.

Since fructose is over twice as sweet as glucose HFCS ends up taking less calories to make something as sweet then if you just poured table sugar into it. Where you do find the 90% fructose corn syrup is in "light" foods where sweetness is needed and the extra cost of HFCS-90 is worth the reduction in calories (probably reduces calories due to sweetener by 1/3).

Interestingly, it is difficult to find fruit with a fructose content greater then 50%, the highest being apples and pears. You are better off eating apples and pears a while before a run and say a banana, grapes, or cherries right after as a quick replenishment. The difference between the two is fairly significant with apples coming in at nearly 70 % fructose and the others in the low 40's. Dates are a spectacular 38% ! This explains why I eat them like candy, instant sugar rush...

The evil aspects of fructose are harder to pin down but ultimately it doesn't matter. I think most of the bad rap has come from the fact that HFCS is cheaper, easier to process, and goes bad more slowly then table sugar so it has allowed so many things to become sweeter more cheaply. In the end the moral of the story is eat less sugar, which we already knew. Doesn't matter what you eat, half of it is likely to be fructose so just eat less of it.

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