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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.'"
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.
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.
Living With a Nerd
Glad to oblige! This story was posted on Science Daily yesterday. They included the following:
Editor's Note: In response to the above-mentioned study, The Corn Refiners Association issued a statement titled "Gross Errors in Princeton Animal Study on Obesity and High Fructose Corn Syrup: Research in Humans Discredits Princeton Study" (http://www.corn.org/princeton-hfcs-study-errors.html). This link is provided for information only -- no editorial endorsement is implied.
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.
Problem solved.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Stop giving our tax money to farmers to over-grow corn and lower the price to the point where corn syrup is cheaper then sugar. Problem solved.
This would also solve the hemorrhagic ecoli problem in cattle farms by making grass cheaper then corn husks for feed.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Arstechnica.com covered this same study the other day. Their writeup is better than mine would be so why don't you read their article? http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars
The abridged version of the abridged version is that this study does not conclusively prove much of anything.
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
It's pretty much common knowledge that cheaper substitute ingredients are almost always unhealthy.
I distrust "common knowledge, especially this bit. Bear in mind that if you find a case where the cheaper alternative is more healthy, people would pretty much go with it and you'd never think about it as it's a no-brainer. The trouble with that is that it tends to bias your perception, as you've shown and can easily keep you from examining a new option because it is cheaper. (In fact, this has been found to be the case: people won't buy products they think are too low in price even when the quality is as good or better. I wish I had my source handy for that.)
Ars Technica covered this a few days ago, and their analysis (as opposed to the publicity blurb the university made up) said the study basically came out a wash. Some groups saw gains, some didn't, but there was no clear pattern.
I'm in the "HFCS should be avoided" camp at the moment, but this study doesn't really prove anything.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The sugar industry had something to do with the problem. Specifically, pushing for import quotas in the early 80s that increased the price. As a result, manufacturers switched to corn syrup and the candy industry moved to Canada and Mexico. The jobs lost from the candy industry most likely outnumber the jobs saved by the import quotas.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Clark: Where's Eddie? He usually eats these goddamn things.
Catherine: Not recently, Clark. He read that squirrels were high in cholesterol.
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Gatorade used to not use HFCS a few years ago. I noticed when they switched to using HCFS and contacted their customer relations department. Here's the response I got from Gatorade:
. . . that nature INTENDED you to drink.
Coffee.
Cane sugar is far more efficient to produce than corn sweetener but is primarily produced in tropical and subtropical regions outside of the United States . The agribusiness lobby in in the United States pays off politicians to restrict imports, driving up the price of sugar within the the U.S. to above that of corn syrup. Without import restrictions on sugar, all those products you buy which are sweetened with corn syrup would be sweetened with sugar instead. And cost less.
You can blame the agribusiness lobby and the protectionist whores in the U.S. congress for this situation. It is a clear-cut case of government power expended to benefit he corrupt few at the expense of the many.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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!
My work here is dung.
Sugar in general should be avoided. Fructose, which is the bad half of sugar and HFCS, is the culprit. It can only be processed by the liver, and during processing it wreaks havoc on the body's systems for controlling hunger, satiation, insulin, etc.
Take the time to watch this talk by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology. It might save your life (by extending your life).
Yep, I can see that commercial too.
Soft focus. Sunrise. Dew on the stalks. A ladybug rouses from slumber. Woman in her natural beauty walks barefoot through soft rows. A newborn baby is cradled in the arms of a woman who has, I promise you, never given birth.
The cutline/voiceover -- "Corn syrup. Made from nature. As natural as Hollywood breasts."
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
It's not an insightful "Duh". While it's not totally new, this is one of the first long term studies comparing consumption of different forms of sugar. The study showed there's a distinct difference between consuming equal amounts of sucrose from sugarcane and fructose from corn. Even the rats that were fed twice as much sucrose didn't gain weight like the rats being fed fructose.
Really you're going to split hairs on this? Are you a long distance runner? I'm guessing no, so just drink water. It's really not that hard to just jump cold turkey and drink water all the time. It's free and there's no sugar or chemicals.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
If you eat foods that only use it as a sweeter, your hunger will still be regulated and prevent you from over-eating. For example, you wouldn't eat a 24-oz steak, I hope, because you would be quite full long before you could finish). On the other hand, most people seem to have a bout as easy time drinking an 8 oz can of soda as a 24oz bottle, even though the 24-oz is 3 times larger.
The same goes for candy, if you replace if with bread, you have no hope of eating as many calories (and that's saying a lot because most people are capable of eating quite a lot of bread).
Use common sense, you don't need to cut high-fructose corn syrup out of you diet completely to dramatically reduce your consumption of it. Simply avoid eating foods where the majority of the calories come from high-fructose corn syrup and you body will take care of the rest.
Make your own ketchup - it's REALLY easy, actually - just google for recipes. It's pretty much just tomato, vinegar, onion powder, and sugar (salt and oil optional), plus perhaps a little starch to get the right texture. Buy canned tomatoes in bulk, throw a can or so of them into a blender with everything else, cook and stir until smooth and even, then put it into a container in the fridge. Cleanup is just running water over everything. 15 minutes work for as much as you want to make. Incidentally, a little more sugar/oil/vinegar makes it into french dressing.
There you go - good ketchup without HFCS.
Ryan Fenton
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...
Learn to love Alaska
No, it's just the corn industry. The corn belt states are stupidly influential, and have managed to maintain sugar tariffs and corn subsidies. If you can get real sugar, it would be much more expensive to use than corn syrup.
Nobody else seems to care. It directly benefits a lot of states, and the image of the Great American Small Family Farm has persisted in the popular imagination since we told the British where to stick their import taxes. If people are even aware of the subsidies, they're not seen as "handouts to big Agribusiness", but help to the mostly non-existent poor struggling farmers.
Most other businesses are still considered "evil." Not sure why agriculture gets a free pass.
Note, I don't mean to be insulting by this, I'm genuinely interested...
Thanks for minding our delicate nationalist sensibilities. Brittle people like me appreciate it.
DATABASE WOW WOW
One thing seems for certain, Laboratory Rats are a miserable lot. They seem to be susceptible to cancer and just about everything else you can imagine. Why not test something really hardy instead? Why not politicians?
Rats are much better human analogs then politicians.
The data in the actual paper doesn't support the conclusion in the title of the Slashdot story.
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.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Heh...
There's been a few other long-term studies that were done that were claimed "inconclusive" prior to this one. Most of them showed there was a serious problem with HFCS, but this one goes further to show that it's worse than many thought of the stuff.
If you're counting calories- it's identical. That's what the producers of HFCS would have you believe is all that matters.
The problem is that it isn't identical. Not even close.
The fructose is in an immediately available fashion to your body, which means it's absorbed on the spot, unlike sucrose which has to be cracked apart first. From there it lies in your blood stream until your liver can utilize it. Your liver absorbs and converts some of this fructose into it's roughly one day's store of glycogen. Once it has a day's worth of reserve, it starts converting the rest as it gets to it into triglycerides and fatty tissue within the liver (Look up "fatty liver disease" via Google...). While it's waiting to be converted the pancreas sees the sugar levels rise and tries to pull the sugar OUT of the blood stream by increasing insulin levels. Unfortunately, only glucose responds directly to the insulin part of your hormone system- fructose is largely processed by your liver and only your liver. This has the predictable effect of yanking the glucose out of your blood stream. At some threshold, the body detects problems caused by the sugars being ripped out of your system by that and starts producing glucagon which orders the liver to start converting the glycogen in it's store back into glucose. Over time, this swinging, the triglycerides, and the other stuff going on combine to provide leptin resistance and insulin resistance- which are the hallmark signs of Type 2 Diabetes, something we're supposedly having an "epidemic" of in the "Western" world.
And this doesn't even get into the traces of mercury and other chemicals you're exposed to when you eat HFCS as part of your diet.
In the end, while you do need Fructose, you don't need the quantities that the Western populace seem to consume, nor do you need or want it in the form that we're exposed to it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas