The News About Corn Syrup: Not So Sweet (or Surprising)

photo by jimmedia

I've mentioned before how offensive I find the website Sweet Surprise, which is sponsored by the corn industry and dedicated to convincing people that the synthetic substance high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is just as "natural" and "healthy" as sugar or honey. Now, pure sugar is a benchmark for neither of those descriptors (and honey is another issue for another day), but high-fructose corn syrup cannot be considered even remotely either, despite their claims to the contrary. The New York Times Health section has an article which cites several studies that linke HFCS to liver and kidney disease and obesity. The article also quotes Michael Pollan, who notes that HFCS “may be cheap in the supermarket, but in the environment it could not be more expensive.” And despite the corn industry's claim that your body can't tell the difference between corn syrup and table sugar, apparently more people are being diagnosed with fructose intolerance, according to the University of Iowa. Say the researchers:

"The problem is that there is no enzyme in the gut to digest fructose. It requires the presence of an equal amount of another sugar—glucose—to be appropriately absorbed into the small intestine. But some foods have far more fructose than glucose, or no glucose at all, and that spells trouble for some people. 'You need a proper diagnosis because it is not a trivial issue,' Rao says. “If you have fructose intolerance you may want and need to make dietary modifications for the rest of your life.' ” [emphasis mine]

And if you eat any kind of processed or restaurant foods at all, following such a diet in this day and age is going to be very difficult--especially when the food industry has already bought the FDA and the AMA (the linked article is an AMA proposition considering whether there should be dietary restrictions on the use of HFCS, but rather than use any human data, they instead just examine the molecules of HFCS and note that "Because the composition of HFCS and sucrose are so similar...it appears unlikely that HFCS contributes more to obesity or other conditions than sucrose." Love that kind of hard science!), making any kind of restrictions on the use of this potentially harmful ingredient wholly unlikely.

But heaven forbid you try to get your hands on some raw milk. That would be truly frightening.