High Fructose Corn Syrup is still bad for you....

Today's post: Thursday, 9-18-2008

TIME online earlier today posted an article about high fructose corn syrup. It seems the Corn Refiners Association, in an effort to keep selling large quantities of high fructose corn syrup, has paid for an 18 month campaign of TV commercials saying it’s not really that bad, is made from natural ingredients, & it’s actually OK if you don’t eat too much of it.

Will people die within a week if they eat some high fructose corn syrup? No. If it were, virtually everyone in the United States now would have been long dead. (It’s in some restaurant foods. So even if you never buy things at the store that contain it, you’ve probably had some. And, it’s been in so many different kinds of foods that you wouldn’t dream would have any for so long you likely ingested quite a lot of it before you found out you’d be better off avoiding it.)

But it is still true that buying or eating or drinking foods containing it will harm your health.

It truly is bad for you. And, the things that make this true still exist despite these ads.

1. Two things have been reported that suggest it should not be in food or drink and never ingested often.

One is that it’s reported to be a direct fattening agent. It provides calories but instead of having the food or drink containing those calories making you less hungry, it tends to increase your appetite instead.

Second, it has been reported to cause metabolic problems and is NOT processed properly by your body. And those researchers believed this effect might help trigger type II diabetes MORE than the equivalent caloric intake of sugar would do or would have done.

Since even people who exercise regularly today still get less exercise than most people did from just walking as little as 100 years ago & have sedentary jobs and spend hours each week watching TV or playing video games or accessing the internet, adding that kind of food ingredient to the foods & drinks people take in will cause & has caused huge numbers of people to get fatter than they can be and stay healthy. And, many more of those people will get type II diabetes than otherwise would have gotten it.

2. For those same reasons, many of the foods high fructose corn syrup is in tend to be those which people who care about their health should eat very infrequently. These range from the fruit punch & popsicle in the Corn Refiners Association ads to soft drinks to commercial baked goods and desserts, many snack foods & many, many others. These kinds of semifoods not only contain high fructose corn syrup, they also tend to contain refined grains, salt, sometimes partially hydrogenated oils (transfats), & sometimes MSG that also are bad for your health or are even worse than high fructose corn syrup.

In addition, these foods and drinks tend to have very little nutrition and very little fiber. And many have very little protein either. That way you can easily wind up overfed calories AND undernourished too. And, that’s exactly what is happening to many people in the United States now. And, it’s happening to most children in the United States as well.

So, if you avoid these foods & drinks because of their high fructose corn syrup content, you will enjoy better health in two ways. You won’t ingest the high fructose corn syrup and get the appetite boost it gives people or ingest these foods and drinks that harm your health in other ways. And, you will eat and drink things instead that actually are beneficial to your health.

3. It’s now in so many foods that most people wouldn’t dream or ever guess high fructose corn syrup would be in that the average American now ingests 60 pounds of high fructose corn syrup each year.

It’s in many kinds of yogurt. It’s in ketchup. It’s in bread – sometimes even whole grain bread. High fructose corn syrup AND added transfats are in a popular peanut butter or were last time I looked at the label.

And, that’s in addition to high fructose corn syrup replacing sugar in sweet foods including jams, jellies, ice cream, and pancake syrups other than real maple syrup.

The TIME article quoted nutrition analyst Marion Nestle as saying this. “High-fructose corn syrup is not a poison, but eating less of any kind of sugar is a good idea these days and anything that promotes eating more is not."

But even if the studies of metabolic problems digesting high fructose corn syrup are discounted or proven wrong, high fructose corn syrup tends to make people eat more. And, because it tastes sweeter, high fructose corn syrup does this more than sugar. In fact, because it’s also cheaper, sweet foods that have high fructose corn syrup may well have more high fructose corn syrup than the sugar they replace and thereby have more calories in addition. You will definitely take in more calories as you’ll usually eat more of the food.


It’s no mystery why high fructose corn syrup got added to foods. It’s sweeter than sugar. It costs less. It’s sometimes easier to do commercial cooking with as it comes as a liquid syrup, I understand. And the TIME article says it extends shelf life besides.

But the bottom line is this: Considering all of the information, you’ll enjoy much better health if you do your best never to ingest high fructose corn syrup.