Fear and Loathing of HFCS

High fructose corn syrup seems to have acquired the mantle of “bad food du jour.” I profess I’ve not studied the current evidence in depth, but I haven’t seem anything that alarms me. (Let me assure you, however, that any type of corn syrup―or anything sweet, for that matter―is decidedly not responsible for my extra pounds.) And so we’ve invited John S. White, Ph.D., president, White Technical Research to dispel two common misconceptions about HFCS.

  -Lynn A. Kuntz

I spend a good portion of my time as a food industry consultant in nutritional biochemistry talking with all sorts of health professionals about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The Corn Refiners Association—a trade organization representing the U.S. corn refining (wet milling) industry—addresses the constant barrage of poorly informed research and opinion about this sweetener. They enlisted my help in the process, because of my long history (27 years) with the product. In this blog, I’ll talk about two common misconceptions of HFCS that I frequently hear in my travels. If this generates sufficient interest and I’m invited back, I’ll talk about additional misconceptions (and there are many) in a future blog.

Misconception 1: Sugar is healthier than HFCS

I’m always struck by the irony of this statement whenever I hear it―and I hear it a lot.  I remember a time in the 1980s when sugar was about the worst thing you could eat. And you dared not feed it to your children for fear of making them hyperactive. Scientific opinion eventually concluded there was nothing inherently evil about sugar, just as scientific opinion is now concluding that HFCS poses no unique health risks. Four expert scientific panels within the past two years—including one from the American Medical Association have confirmed that sugar and HFCS are nutritionally equivalent. This is not surprising, given their similar proportions of the sugars fructose and glucose: sucrose is a disaccharide of fructose bonded to glucose; HFCS is roughly equal amounts of fructose and glucose as monosaccharides (free sugars). And, because of this similarity in chemical composition, sugar and HFCS are equally sweet and equally caloric.

Misconception 2: HFCS is to blame for obesity and causes diabetes

This notion took on a life of its own after a hypothesis by a noted nutritionist was published in 2004 suggesting that HFCS is uniquely to blame for obesity—that is, there is something beyond its caloric value that makes HFCS especially obesigenic. The hypothesis was based on an association between increased use of HFCS and increased incidence of obesity over the past 35 years. Other scientists sought to prove the hypothesis by publishing studies in which pure fructose (at doses 3-5 times that encountered in the typical American diet) caused various metabolic upsets. These researchers seemed unconcerned that pure fructose is not HFCS (half fructose/half glucose). Subsequent experiments comparing HFCS with sugar showed that they produce the exact same effect on common biochemical markers for obesity: serum glucose and insulin; the obesity hormones leptin and ghrelin; uric acid and triglycerides; and measures of hunger and satiety.

USDA data show that consumption of HFCS is actually in decline, while U.S. obesity rates continue to climb. And, in other parts of the world where HFCS is scarce (it’s largely a U.S. sweetener), obesity rates are quite high. So HFCS is not uniquely to blame for obesity in the United States or in the world at large.

Certainly, HFCS is a caloric ingredient, and if products containing it are consumed to excess, weight gain will occur. But the same can be said for any caloric ingredient, be it sugar, fats, proteins, alcohol or other carbohydrates. The take-home message here is that sugar and HFCS are nutritionally interchangeable; if HFCS were removed from foods and beverages, it would be replaced by sugar with absolutely no health change or benefit to consumers.

More information about HFCS can be found at the following websites: http://www.hfcsfacts.com/ and http://www.sweetsurprise.com/.

  -John S. White, Ph.D.