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High Fructose Corn Syrup To Get a Makeover
An anonymous reader writes "With its sweetener linked to obesity, some cancers and diabetes, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) doesn't want you to think 'fructose' when you see high fructose corn syrup in your soda, ketchup or pickles. Instead, the AP reports, the CRA submitted an application to the FDA, hoping to change the name of their top-selling product to 'corn sugar.'"
"With its sweetener linked to obesity, some cancers and diabetes, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) doesn't want you to think 'fructose' when you see high fructose corn syrup in your soda, ketchup or pickles. Instead, the AP reports, the CRA submitted an application to the FDA, hoping to change the name of their top-selling product to 'corn sugar.'"
What's in a name? High-fructose corn syrup by any other name would taste as sweet ... and still make your cancer cells multiply.
And here thought that fraud and false advertising was illegal in this country. If the Feds go for this then they're not doing their jobs.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When manufacturers start *printing "No HFCS!" on packaging*, your ship has pretty much sailed, folks.
...can we start calling cigarettes, "All natural inhaled plant extracts"?
What's in a name? that which we call an industrial chemical
By any other name would taste as sweet;
So HFCS would, were it not HFCS call'd,
Retain that cloying mouthfeel which it owes
Without that title. HFCS, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all my pancreas.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Kinda off topic, but is anyone else enjoying the "real-sugar" sodas that are in supermarkets? Man so delicious, I stocked up on it. I wish this was sold all the time.
...and won't be the last. "Confectioners' glaze" (common candy coating) sounds so much better than "lac bug secretion". "Gelatin" sounds so much better than "pig skin extract". "Carmine" (used for red coloring) sounds better than "cochineal insect secretion".
Why can't these guys do the right thing and stop making this evil stuff? Playing a shell game with the facts does not change reality.
Yes, well, you can thank a company called UOP for pioneering the process of making this stuff on an industrial scale (that was actually back in the sixties.) And you can also thank Congress for so fucking over the countries that used to grow cane sugar and sell it to us, which is why we even needed a substitute in the first place. Now, of course, those growers have switched to cocaine, cannabis, and other much more profitable crops.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, its sugar lobbyists as much, if not more, than corn lobbyists. The US has import tariffs on foreign cane sugar to prop up the price of the domestic stuff, which makes it too expensive to use in wide-scale production here. That's why foreign versions of Coke and Pepsi products are made with real sugar, where as we get the cheap corn shit.
I was a lobbyist myself for a non-profit social organization in a past career. I was at a luncheon fundraiser in DC for a congressman from a midwestern, corn-raising state and was seated across from a sugar lobbyist, and in between a guy from Raytheon and a guy from Microsoft. The sugar lobbyist was the biggest asshole of the three, too.
Still makes us all fat.
In response to [successful] bad press, the HFCS crowd is pushing for the rebranding the horrid syrup as "corn sugar". A waste of time and money, I wager, in the end. Ignoring the fact that it is reasonably well established that HFCS is not good for you, it tastes like crap. Compare yellow-capped Coke (yellow=kosher) with the "regular" sold in the US...there is no comparison (inexplicably, Coke only inflicts HFCS on the US market).
PETA recently attempted the same campaign to rebrand FISH as SEA KITTENS...apparently they felt that people wouldn't be so willing to eat something with a cuddly persona. Completely backfired with me...I had never thought of it before, but have you tried Kitten & Chips??? A new personal favorite. Kitten, the other, other white meat.
Who knows, maybe kitten tastes better in a nice HFCS glaze...
You are wrong. Very wrong. "AFAIK" is an insufficient fig leaf for your level of wrongness, which seems nearly malicious in its degree.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Well, the candidates could do what politicians do best: lie through their teeth. Then eliminate the tariffs as would be appropriate for a country seeking to participate in the GLOBAL ECONOMY .
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Per Amazon:
Corn Sugar is the common name for dextrose.
and per Wise Geek
Corn sugar is a natural sweetener that is made utilizing starch that is extracted from kernels of corn. The extracted cornstarch is then refined to create a solid sugar or to make another popular sweetening agent known as corn syrup...
The process for making corn sugar begins with the removal of starchy elements from the corn. The extracted elements are actually glucose, although the refining process will transform them into another form of sugar known as dextrose. With the production of syrup, the corn sugar becomes a high fructose corn syrup...
It sounds like "corn sugar" is already used to refer to a separate product. If they don't want to continue using "HFCS," then come up with another word, the same way they did with "Tilapia."
But I think they're shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, are they trying to give ammunition to the healthier foods? First, the other projects can continue to claim that they don't contain HFCS, and they can also make fun of the other brands for trying to hide what's in their foods.
I mean, it's going to be like a fucking field day for the health foods.
coding is life
Sucrose is not good for you, the reason HFCS gets all the attention because fructose is noticeably worse. Sugar refiners deserve to have their names dragged through the mud almost as much as corn refiners have been.
Frankly, I think the CRA should be sued for attempting to defraud the American public by selling a product known to be harmful under a new name for the sole purpose of deceiving said public into buying a product they do not wish to buy.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It's pretty amazing. Do the experiment yourself - get some "mexican coke" or Pepsi Throwback (with sugar), and some regular soda.
Over the course of 15 minutes, drink 2 cans of regular soda. No big deal, right? Later on or the next day, drink sugar-based soda, and after drinking under 12 ounces of it, you will likely feel full, and like you don't want to drink anymore, in a way thats very different from HFCS-soda. I'd be surpised if you can even finish 24oz of sugar soda in 15 min (without forcing yourself).
It's not the HFCS, it's your ass, in that chair, 12 hours a day
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Or doubleplusgood sugar?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
I don't know, but maybe it was made by Altria Group.
(Hint to editors: Altria Group changed their name because of the negative connotations of their previous name, Philip Morris.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Unicorn sweetener.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The government is paying farmers to make a product that is killing the populace. And they are borrowing the money from China to do it. What's wrong with THIS picture?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
This reminds me of when the Nuclear Power Industry, specifically Detroit Edison, referred to radiation as "Sunshine Units" at their cuddly exhibit at the Michigan State Fair back in the early 60s.
Corn-Sugar is already in use, it means dextrose. Ask anyone who homebrews.
A lot of candy manufacturers have moved out of the US, relocating to Canada or Mexico where they have access to cheap sugar. I'll bet the jobs lost from sugar tariffs exceeds the jobs saved (or "touched", as it's now measured) by sugar tariffs.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
HFCS-55 is 55% fructose. Cane sugar is sucrose, which is one quick reaction (which happens in the stomach before absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream) away from being 50% fructose. If the enemy is fructose, cane sugar is almost as bad as HFCS.
The enemy is our high-sugar diet in general. We should have switched over to Sweetleaf / Stevia 30 years ago, as it would have let us continue with our current taste in foods, only healthier.
But someone (corn or sugar lobby is the obvious culprit, but don't count out the artificial sugar guys, most of them are made by huge chem companies) had a friend in high places place a ban on the stuff back in the early 90s.
No doubt because you can replace sugar (and all artificial sugar) with processed Stevia at something like a 30 to 1 ratio -- I use 1/4th a teaspoon to make an entire pitcher of KoolAid, as opposed to a cup or whatnot of sugar. In other words, if we had switched to Stevia, all three of the HFCS, the Cane Sugar, and the cancer causing alternatives would have been rendered obsolete, incredibly rapidly. There's an interesting dynamic going on -- the sweetener industry uses something that's incredibly unhealthy but dirt cheap, and when that starts to go south they also sell us (equally if not worse) alternatives under the guise of "health food". All while ignoring an actual healthy alternative cause they can't control it.
The complaint was that "we just don't know if this Stevia thing is OK", and after banning they... promptly refused to study it to see if it WAS ok. It's a really common tactic, really.
Meanwhile, Japan's been using the stuff for 30 years with no ill effects. At all.
Oh, and they recently unbanned it (Maybe. They might have just "unbanned" the fake-but-patentable alternatives. See the Owndoc link above), but only after huge chemical company Cargil and artificial sweetener company Merisant -- aka the GM seed jerks and makers of Roundup, Monsanto -- found a way to make cancer-causing, but patentable, alternatives -- Truvia (Coke/Cargil) and Purvia (Pepsi/Monsanto).
Since Stevia's an incredibly easy to grow herb (you almost definitely can find a powdered or liquid version at your local store in the health food section, or a live plant the gardening section when it's that time of year), well, they couldn't compete with THAT.
Meanwhile, if you do grow it yourself, tossing a leaf or two in with one's tea sweetens it up quite perfectly. Enjoy.
Cane sugar has essentially no free-form fructose. Refined cane sugar is nearly pure sucrose, a disaccharide. Admittedly, it is composed glucose and fructose structures, they are chemically bonded and is not metabolised the same way as either one of the monosaccharides (glucose and fructose).
HFCS is an engineered product that takes regular corn syrup (essential pure glucose) and turns it into a mixture of free form glucose and fructose in order to produce a substance that tastes the same (sweetness-wise) as table/cane sugar.
"Corn Sugar" would actually be distinctly incorrect if used to refer to HFCS, as that term is already used to refer to crystalline glucose (Commonly known in the food world as dextrose).
Believe it or not people are not that stupid when it comes to labels. You could call it unicorn spit and after a lag period the same baggage and public reaction will eventually be restored.
It happened with trans fats where manufacturers would just adjust the serving size such that each serving contained less than .5 grams just to get away with legally claiming their product contained 0g trans fat. How the govt allowed such rank nonsense to occur in the first place is beyond comphrension.. At the end of the day it didn't matter.
The end result was that the "*0g trans fat" advertisement became meaningless and people started looking for the word "partially hydrogenated" in the ingredients to make their purchasing decision.
And here thought that fraud and false advertising was illegal in this country. If the Feds go for this then they're not doing their jobs.
I'm propose a new ad campaign along the lines of "Got Milk!?". In this case it would be "Get fruct!!!!"
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The problem is, HFCS-55 fails to trigger the satiety reflex properly. And the vast majority of items it's put into are items that already aren't so great for you.
Soda/pop is particularly bad because it combines multiple known agents: caffeine (diuretic), carbonic acid (makes the tissues of mouth and throat feel dry), sodium chloride (ever drink salt water? Notice how it doesn't help you quench thirst?), and HFCS-55 rather than actual sugar to bypass satiety reflex. "Diet" sodas are even worse; nutrasweet dries out the mouth tissues in an action very similar to the carbonic acid, for a "double whammy."
The end result being that you can guzzle a 64-ounce Big Gulp down, feel yourself needing to pee, and at the same time still feel thirsty right after you finish the damn thing. Or in other words: go ahead. Drink your weight in nectar, lardo.
Whole Wheat Bread will raise your blood sugar but lesser & slower than White Bread or HFCS or regular sugar because of
the difference between complex & simple carbohydrates.
Eating an Orange will raise your sugar less than drinking Orange Juice because the Orange has more fibre in it.
Consuming any carb will raise your blood sugar, but complex carbs & carbs with fibre are a little better.
Actually the diabetes is for-real and not "pop-culture" medicine. Go reading up on the research. It causes major insulin spikes (because it goes into the bloodstream and doesn't respond to insulin (glucose does that)- and it is processed only by your liver.
Drinking a corn-syrup sweetened soda is very much like drinking a beer without the drunk- with the same impact on your system.
HCFS is NOT the same as sucrose, contrary to anything the industry has said on the subject. It's two monosaccarides instead of a disaccaride just for starters- it metabolizes completely differently with differing metabolic effects on you.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Sometime in the future, the corn syrup industry (which includes the entire beverage industry, and much of the food industry) is going to see revealed the evidence that its scientists and execs all knew that their corn syrup products were increasing people's cancer, diabetes and other disease rates, and was habit forming. Even as they worked to cover up those evil facts with cheerful, healthy marketing. Exactly like the tobacco industry. Then there'll be hell to pay.
--
make install -not war
They started using Fructose as it was a little better for diabetics to process over the usual glucose it replaced.
But the problem is that Fructose is only metabolised by the liver and so it can cause liver damage.
Every cell in your body can metabolise glucose.
Exactly. My wife is from Mexico and she and her brother often complain about how damned sweet everything in the US has to be. The same trend follows with people from other countries. They don't use it in products from overseas for a reason. It tastes and behaves completely different from real sugar. I can't for the life of me think of why it's used in damn near everything, even products that are not traditionally though of as "sweet" other than it being so cheap in comparison to real sugar.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
If fructose is so much worse than sucrose, then why is it frequently used as an alternative sweetener to sucrose for diabetics? (See, for example, manufacturers such as Fifty 50)
Fructose causes blood glucose levels to rise more slowly than glucose (duh...) or sucrose. As a result, it is a better sweetener for diabetics. Sucrose needs to be split into its components (glucose and sucrose) followed by chemical reactions that convert fructose to glucose. Fructose needs to be converted in its entirety.
However HFCS is pretty bad news, due to that 45% glucose which can be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream (even through the cheeks!) without any processing by the body, it's actually worse than sucrose for diabetics. (It took me a while to get used to "High fructose corn syrup != fructose".)
(I've been a Type I diabetic for over 15 years.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No, sucrose is split immediately into glucose and fructose, which from that point is metabolized exactly the same as that in HFCS. There is reasonable evidence that fructose may be bad for you, but you get about the same amount of fructose from typically used HFCS as you do from sucrose. HFCS contains slightly more fructose relative to glucose than does sucrose, but it is also sweeter, so less of it is used. It ends up being pretty much a wash. Details and references to primary scientific literature can be found here.