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There is a lot being said about high fructose corn syrup these days, most of it bad. The jury is still out on if or how bad it actually is for you, officially-speaking. And what makes me think it must not be really great for you, is that manufacturers will often use alternate names for it when listing ingredients.
What does seem clear to me is – If high fructose corn syrup got you high, you would be high ALL THE TIME. Because it’s in virtually EVERYTHING!
From things I’ve heard about it, from it possibly inhibiting satiety, to being turned into fat more efficiently than actual sugar because of how it’s broken down, I’ve decided to start avoiding it as much as possible.
This isn’t easy, however. Because not only is it in SO MUCH food out there (things you never would have thought of), but it’s also referred to by different names.
Scary Stuff – The scariest things I’ve read about high fructose corn syrup
I’ve read that high fructose is not metabolized by the body until it gets to the liver, at which point it is turned into fat. It is not metabolized BEFORE it gets to the liver (like most foods), therefore it has to be turned it to fat before it can ever be used.
I’ve also read that it inhibits satiety (feelings of fullness after a meal) for basically the same reason. Your body does not detect that it has consumed as many calories as it actually has (since they are not starting to be metabolized while still eating), therefore the feeling of fullness comes after eating far more calories than it if those calories had been easily metabolizable. In other words, if those calories had been anything other than hfcs, your body would have signalled fullness and you would have stopped eating sooner.
And I think the thing that scares me the most is the deceptive phrasing and words that are used by the promoters of hfcs who try to convince you it is safe. I have read more than one article where, about 1 or 2 paragraphs in, they substitute the phrase “high fructose corn syrup” with the word “fructose.”
It seems they are trying to just casually shorten the phrase hfcs to fructose, as if the two are interchangable. They are not. They are two very different things.
I can’t tell you how many articles start out like this, and I paraphrase here, but you get my drift: “There are a great deal of questions floating around out there about whether hfcs is bad for people. Much of the rhetoric going around seems to indicate that hfcs is bad because it’s unnatural. But actually, fructose is found naturally in fruit and a lot of other food that grows out of the ground…”
The fact that they are SO slimy and slippery and evade the topic in such an underhanded way, well, that just scares me the most. What exactly are they hiding? Why won’t they seem to address this question head-on in event he slightest way?
HFCS Found In Surprising Places
There is already a list out there of items containing hfcs, so I’m not going to do that here. But here is a list of some of the things I’ve found high fructose corn syrup in that were a big surprise to me.
Dry Roasted Peanuts – A store brand of dry roasted peanuts (I can’t remember which store) They were not being sold as “flavored” or anything. They were just labeled as Dry Roasted Peanuts.
Bread – Virtually every type of every brand out there. Including “whole grain” and healthy alternatives.
Yogurt – A friend of mine from England once said, “In America, there is not much ‘yogurt’ in yogurt.” And he was right. It’s more like pudding, nutritionally-speaking, in my opinion. To my shock and horror, most yogurt contains high fructose corn syrup.
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Thanks for this site. I have been telling people for years that HFCS was not a good thing. I have found that some “sugar free” drinks have HFCS. What’s the point? I have told my friends to be wary of any ingredient that ends with —ose. If they remembered their high school biology they would know that it’s a form of sugar. I feel 100% different when my diet is sans HFCS or any sugar. Thanks again for the site
OH, I have so much to say about HCFS!
1) Fructose is metabolized in cells differently than glucose or lactose (milk sugar). It requires the cell to expend a molecule of energy (ATP) to metabolize it. It is essentially robbing your cells of their energy.
2) I’m not worried about fructose in fruit as it has such nutritional ‘bang for the buck’ but note that almost all ‘natural’ sugars contain fructose as well such as ‘evaporated cane juice or sugar”, honey, molasses etc. However, I’d much rather have these things to sweeten foods than the highly processed and completely un-natural HFCS.
3) Read the “Sugar Fix” by Richard Johnson, MD who has been doing research in this field and on obesity for many years. He’s currently located at the Univ. of Health Sci. Colorado. He wrote this book for the public I believe because none of the medical societies have been willing to acknowledge the growing body of research especially about the sugar-obesity link.
4) The corn industry is powerful. The show up to the medical society meetings as ‘vendors’ and then the whole medical conference is biased by what they DON”t say. There are no lectures on Dr. Johnson’s work or Peter Havel’s work at Berkeley. If people just put products back on the shelf that contain HFCS, the food manufacturers would get the message.
5) The American Heart Association came out with recommendations about added sugar (someone finally stepped up to the plate!). For women, we should be getting no more than 7 tsp. (28 gms) a day, men no morne than 9 tsp a day (36 gms). That’s 1 can of soda and your done for the day.
Sorry so windy…I was caught in a passionate moment!