After reading the label on a package of cocktail nuts they were snacking on in the office, the Huffington Post staff were surprised to find high fructose corn syrup as one of the main ingredients in what they had believed to be a healthy snack food sweetened with honey. This discovery prompted them to look for corn syrup in other surprising places. Some of these corn-syrup-containing products might surprise you:
Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
Yogurts
Bread
Cereal bars
Frozen pizza
Cocktail nuts
Tonic water
Salad dressing
Canned fruit
Applesauce
Ketchup
Jams and jellies
Let me add a couple more to the list that have shocked me when I read the labels and discovered high fructose corn syrup as an ingredient:
Bread crumbs
Prepared frosting
Cake mix
Pickles
Peanut butter
Coffee creamer
“healthy” cereals
margarine
chocolate bars
“maple flavored” pancake syrup
Why should you care if you eat so much corn syrup, high fructose or otherwise? Tune in tomorrow…
The Corn Refiners Association would like us to believe that ingesting high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is as natural for the body as eating an ear of corn. They even snail-mailed me a whole package filled with convincingly-assembled literature after I wrote a post critical of HFCS, not to mention their slick television campaign showing teenagers drinking sodas and talking about how “natural” HFCS is.
Luckily, we, the purchasing public, are not so easily fooled.
High fructose corn syrup is the result of a highly complex chemical process conducted in a laboratory — this stuff does not occur naturally on our planet, it has to be synthesized. Just knowing this should be setting off warning bells.
If you read Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, you know that we overproduce corn in this country, and in an effort to help our farmers add value to the US corn crop the University of Iowa developed a host of corn byproducts, including HFCS.
A sample of products made with high fructose corn syrup
HFCS exploded on the market in the early 1980s because it was cheaper than sugar and had a longer shelf-life. Coincidentally, the obesity epidemic in this country really began to build around this time (it really exploded in the 1990s). In the last twenty years, HFCS has captured 56% of the sweetener marketplace. Hmmmm…. Could there be a connection?
Is it better to ingest products made with sugar than those made with HFCS? In a word: Yes.
And no.
While sugar will be metabolized much better than HFCS, it can still carry a glycemic load and can spike blood sugar levels and then send you crashing down afterward. The most preferable way to eat sugar is to have sweet things following a healthy meal, when the stomach has other foods in it to buffer the digestion. The least perferable way to eat sugar is on an empty stomach.
Most unfortunately, I did see recently that soon all of the sugar beets in this country will be genetically modified beets. Sigh.
, you know that we overproduce corn in this country, and in an effort to help our farmers add value to the US corn crop the University of Iowa developed a host of corn byproducts, including HFCS.
