Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Toxicity often cause of pain

What a surprise it was to find out someone from Washington, D.C. read my local Citizen article last month. Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Growers Association, wants me to tell readers that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is “nutritionally equivalent to sucrose,” or table sugar. She provided links from scientific sources to support the claim.

While her information is correct regarding the comparison of glucose and fructose contents of both sugars, science is not needed to understand how HFCS is made. In order to separate corn starch from the kernel, a caustic soda often contaminated with mercury is used. Half of all HFCS products tested are found to contain mercury. The starch is then mixed with genetically modified enzymes that were products of bacterial and fungal processes.

My concern is that the manufactured fructose in HFCS is not the same fructose that is in sucrose (table sugar from sugar cane or beet). Refined fructose not only converts to fat much faster, it also accelerates fatty liver disease.

While all sugars should be consumed in moderation, it has become nearly impossible to do so in our modern food supply. Also, be aware there is no mercury level considered safe.

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2 comments:

  1. Hi,
    Have you ever considered the real ratio of fructose to glucose in HFCS? The CRA claims that HFCS-55 is used to sweeten soda. HFCS-55 is 55% fructose: 45% glucose. Now, to the casual observer that appears to be very close to the 50:50 ratio found in sucrose. That is,
    until you do the math correctly.
    55%:45% = 55/45 = 1.22
    This means that there is, compared to glucose,
    22% more fructose in every can of Coke. In layman terms this means that if your drink five cans of HFCS-55 sweetened Coke it is
    equivalent to drinking 4 1/4 cans of sucrose sweetened soda PLUS 3/4 can of pure fructose.
    Perhaps the fructose that is generated from
    isomerized glucose from corn is chemically identical to fructose found in strawberries' but, it is my humble opinion that the
    fructose>>glucose ratio is what is slowly killing us, or at least making us fatter and sicker. Remember, the CRA designed HFCS. They
    designed a fructose enriched industrial sweetener and now they're backpedaling and saying that it is essentially similar to sucrose. If they were trying to make something that was akin to sucrose, why didn't they stick with the ratio found in nature, 50:50?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your math is solid except you forgot that HFCS is 20% sweeter than sucrose. So you need 20% less.

    0.8 * 1.22 = 0.976.

    So there's less calories in an equivalently sweet HFCS Coke than a Sucrose Coke.

    ReplyDelete

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