High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats

krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, 'Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that 'When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight.'"

Comments

HFC

[Anonymous Coward]

That is because HFC is absorbed by the body in the same way that beer and alcohol is. In the liver. HFC also suppresses the satiety (hunger) signal so people tend to eat more.

Re:HFC

[inKubus]

HFCS is created with an enzymatic process. The HFCS food companies buy is dirty. It's mostly fructose and glucose but it also contains the enzymes used to convert the corn starch. You can't remove it all, apparently. And the standards are based on very small serving sizes. When people are drinking 50-100g a day of it, this enzyme builds up in the human system and attaches to other starch and performs the same conversion process to sugar. Normally this process takes more energy but with the unnatural enzyme it doesn't, and therefore it causes more efficient breakdown of starch. These people also tend to have a bag of chips or fries with their 50-100g of corn syrup. This means all of that becomes sugar. Since the body can't use the sugar, insulin is released and reactions occur and "bada-bing" FAT.

See Alpha-amylase, Glucoamylase, and Xyloase.

Re:HFC

[DigiShaman]

I was skeptical, but still on the fence with this issue. But after killing my soft drink consumption in favor of pure carbonated water, I've shed quite a bit of weight in the span of a few months. I've also felt less hungry.

I'm now a believer that HFCS should be avoided whenever possible. Every now and then is fine to consume products with it as in with anything else in moderation. But when it becomes a major staple of your diet, bad stuff starts to happen to your body.

Everyone do yourself a favor, drop the Mt Dew. It's bad mojo.

Not as bad as something else

[Pojut]

HFCS is bad, but not NEARLY as bad as Crystalline Fructose, which makes an appearance in beverages like Vitamin Water. Do some google searching on it...it's much harder to break down in your liver than HFCS.

http://www.thefitshack.com/2007/03/28/what-is-crystalline-fructose/ for some examples.

Patriotism and Elections

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that isn't going to matter as long as Iowa and the corn farmers have the political power that they do.

If there is one good thing about the new "Obamacare" bill, it's that unhealthy things will cost the government money. The downside is they will now have one more reason to regulate.

It's all about the fiber

[bunratty]

All fructose is processed by the liver in the same way as alcohol. That includes fruit juice.

All this changes in the presence of fiber. If you eat a piece of fresh fruit, the fiber in the fruit changes the way the fructose from the fruit is absorbed so it's not such a huge shock to the liver.

The bottom line is that if you eat carbohydrates, you should make sure it's with plenty of fiber. In other words, eat pieces of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, just as nutritionists have been telling us for years. On food labels, I look for a % USRDA of fiber greater than or equal to the % USRDA of carbohydates, or grams of fiber at least 1/10 the grams of carbohydrate. It makes you feel more full with less food and prevents the sugar rush and crash from your liver absorbing the carbs too quickly.

Re:Queue . . .

[eldavojohn]

If the rats had free access, how did they control for the amount consumed?

Your criticisms may be apt but I would like to point out that after listening the evil shroud surrounding HFCS I decided to do an experiment with myself to see if eliminating HFCS from my diet while eating the same as I always have would cause me to lose or gain weight.

And I had to make sure only to buy things at Trader Joes since my local grocery store carried but one loaf of bread with no HFCS in it and it was hilariously marked up as some organic bullshit.

The problems didn't stop there. HFCS is quite literally everywhere. It's a preservative, a sweetener, everything. It got to be really ridiculous. After about a month of the whole charade my weight was about the same but I had been having wild cravings of ketchup (no, I wasn't pregnant). After satisfying this with some baked potatoes and french fries here and there loaded with ketchup, it dawned on me to inspect the label of my Heinz ketchup bottle. Fucking HFCS. Seriously? Upon returning to the store the "organic" ketchup is ridiculously expensive.

Due to government subsidies and advanced food science, you cannot control your intake of HFCS. It's bloody impossible in today's America. I don't know how to fix this but you can be damned sure the Corn lobby likes it this way. I'm not saying it's as evil as trans fats or bad cholesterol but holy hell is it pervasive and uncapitalistically inexpensive!

Re:Queue . . .

[AK Marc]

It's just the corn industry. The restrictions on sugar imports drive up the price so that sugar can't win (it can compete, but companies will take HFCS at 5% less or whatever). Then, because sugar beets would be barely cheaper and sugar cane could be grown in some areas, they get price subsidies on the corn. So importing the cheap sugar cane sugar is expensive, and growing it here results in reduced yields that can't compete with the subsidized corn.

It's the same reason that marijuana is illegal. The cotton lobby made it illegal because they feared hemp. Then it became a moral issue (that oddly, no one had about tobacco and we had just swung the other way on with alcohol) and we exported our morals to the rest of the world. But at least the rest of the world tastes our HFCS and doesn't use it...

Re:Queue . . .

[deglr6328]

I would like to endorse the sentiment expressed by Ars and expand upon it. Since I have access to most scientific journals, a couple days ago when this study was first published, but before any secondary analysis appeared on the web, I printed it out and took it home to read. I read scientific papers all the time (usually physics and chemistry), probably hundreds of papers per year, so I like to think that I'm pretty familiar with how good science is done and what constitutes a well designed, rigorously conducted investigation.

The impression I got while reading this paper, is that it is a total piece of crap. It is confusingly written to begin with, but there are serious problems with methodology, controls, conclusions, assumptions about caloric intake and claimed statistical significance. It's a joke. Which, I guess is why it's published in an obscure journal with a pathetic 2.7 impact factor. Two sites explaining the problems in more detail are the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe forums at: http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,26925.15.html and this blog post by Marion Nestle (a New York University professor in the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health with a Ph.D. in molecular biology): http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/03/hfcs-makes-rats-fat/

None of this told me how Princeton, of all places, could publish such a shit study though.....until I noticed this at the top of the paper that all the authors are from the Uni's PSYCHOLOGY department. Oh, I guess that's how.