It's been ages since I've reached for a Mountain Dew, but when PepsiCo introduced its Throwback line of "retro" sodas in 2009, I was tempted. Its "real sugar" sweetener seemed much more appealing than the high-fructose corn syrup that's been ubiquitous in sodas since the mid-1980s. Clearly, I wasn't alone. Catering to the sensibilities of the marketplace, Starbucks, Snapple, Kraft, and food giant ConAgra have all recently ditched HFCS in favor of sugar. This sea change hasn't escaped the notice of the Corn Refiners Association. Last September, after blowing more than $30 million on ads aimed at saving corn syrup's faltering rep (if you think HFCS is any worse than sugar, "You're in for a sweet surprise!"), the trade group finally threw in the towel and petitioned the FDA to let it rebrand its product as "corn sugar."*
This earned the refiners plenty of flak, but you can hardly blame them for trying. After years of flogging by nutritionists and foodies, HFCS has become, well, a four-letter word.
It's really an arsenic versus cyanide choice - they both can kill you!
But it is clear that HFCS is the worse of the 2 - see follow on
I am so glad to see that the "Sugar Story" is getting traction.
Why are we so fat now?
"Prior to 1900, about 4 percent of America's calories came from fructose, while today's teens get roughly 12 percent of their calories that way. Since sugar and corn syrup are equally efficient as fructose delivery vehicles, the obvious conclusion is simply that we're consuming too many sweets. As for the HFCS-vs.-sugar smackdown, you might as well debate whether whiskey is healthier than rum. "In high-enough quantities, they're both poison," says Lustig."
"Similac now sells a heavily sweetened infant formula, and a 2005 study linked obesity in Harlem toddlers to WIC-subsidized juice. A new study in the journal Obesity suggests that some beverage makers may even be using souped-up HFCS formulas. University of Southern California researchers analyzed sweet drinks from L.A. markets and fast-food joints, and found several (namely bottled Pepsi, Coke, and Sprite) with fructose-to-glucose ratios approaching 65/35—a result yet to be replicated widely.
Lustig recommends that the average adult consume no more than 50 grams of fructose per day—about five Mrs. Field's chocolate-chip cookies—and preferably not all at once.
A 20-ounce soda containing 37.5 grams of fructose is "going to be a shock to the liver if you drink it all in one sitting," he says. Ideally, your fructose should come with plenty of fiber, which slows its entry into the bloodstream. One place where the two are ingeniously packaged together: an apple. Talk about a throwback."
This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.
In the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1970, around 15 percent of the U.S. population met the definition for obesity; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese, the CDC reported. High-fructose corn syrup is found in a wide range of foods and beverages, including fruit juice, soda, cereal, bread, yogurt, ketchup and mayonnaise. On average, Americans consume 60 pounds of the sweetener per person every year.
"Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic," Avena said
