sugar

Common table sugar is refined from sugar cane, beets, dates or other plant sources. Photo courtesy of Lauri Andler.

Is high fructose corn syrup bad for you? The short answer is yes. High fructose corn syrup has been linked with obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver damage and more. It’s not just high fructose corn syrup that’s fattening Americans and breaking down their health, though — it’s a lifestyle. A lifestyle that’s founded on cheap, convenient, readily available and nutritionally moot foods is at the core of poor health in America.

That brings us to the long answer, which, not surprisingly, is a little longer. And it necessarily includes a bit of history.

In the 1820’s a rapidly growing world shipping infrastructure put sudden, surprising pressure on American sugar plantations. Domestic sugar planters realized in a flash of panic that they couldn’t compete with Caribbean growers whose products were far cheaper and quickly becoming widely available. Caribbean plantations enjoyed a perfect climate for sugar cane cultivation, and they benefited from very cheap, very plentiful labor. American sugar planters, rather than resort to growing other crops more suitable for the land, appealed to the government for protection from economic hardship. The government’s response was twofold: they imposed wildly high tariffs on foreign sugar while subsidizing U.S. producers to ensure favorable profit margins.

The high price of sugar survived through profit motivated politicking. Politicians who advocated the twisted trade policies and rigorous import regulations that inflated sugar prices were widely backed by U.S. sugar plantation owners. Their multi-billion dollar operations easily supported political campaigns alongside ritzy charity balls and weekend soirées. The end result was that sugar prices in the United States ranged anywhere from twice to seven times that of world prices throughout the 1800’s and all the way into the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Enter high fructose corn syrup. First introduced in 1957, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) didn’t become commercially viable until around 1965 when Dr. Y. Takasaki, a Japanese scientist, perfected a cheap method of its production. The impact of his new refining technique was explosive.

Most foods in America are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, which is made from cheap, abundant corn.

American corn was (and still is) incredibly abundant. Heavily subsidized by the U.S. government, corn grown in the United States was flooding local and foreign markets at remarkably low prices. In the eyes of candy, baked goods and soft drink manufacturers, any technology that could turn corn into sugar was baking the equivalent of the ancient alchemist’s pie in the sky: glittering, pure gold from boring, gray lead.

Food manufacturing giants like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Hostess and the like immediately snatched at the opportunity to sweeten their products for pennies on the dollar by using HFCS instead of true sugar. Other food industries weren’t slow to follow. By the 1980’s foods all over the U.S. from peanut butter to bread to yogurt, canned fruit, chips, sweets, drinks, canned soups and just about everything in between had hopped on the HFCS band-wagon. This trend has continued to flourish to this day. Food producers of all kinds can hardly resist the temptation to sweeten their goods on the cheap. And the result? Fructose, fructose everywhere.

What does this all mean for the American people? It means they are constantly bombarded with hastily manufactured, poor quality, unhealthy foods. The HFCS invasion in the United States has encouraged a massive flood of shockingly cheap, sweet foods into the marketplace. And it’s not just junk food: the principle of 19th century industrialism — combining cheap materials and cheap labor to drive up profits — has permeated the food market so thoroughly that genuinely whole, healthy foods have been pushed into a fringe selection of “premium” products.

The size of the role which HFCS plays in the deterioration of U.S. health is debatable, but a few disturbing correlations float to the surface with just a cursory glance at the facts.

Take, for example, the obesity epidemic which affects nearly a third of Americans. The obesity problem in the United States began its rapid ascent at about the same time HFCS made its way into everyday foods and drinks — a fact which has many researchers convinced of a causal relationship. Another disturbing reality of HFCS production is its reliance on genetically modified (GM) corn, or corn whose DNA has been engineered to improve production. GM corn, introduced about a decade after HFCS became prevalent in the marketplace, accounts for about 85% of the corn in America. The ecological, economical and human health concerns posed by GM foods warrant a post of their own. We’ll look into GM foods in more detail sometime next week.

The collapse of modern America’s health isn’t a direct result of HFCS’s effect on the body, instead it’s a product of the massive prevalence of high calorie foods on the U.S. market. Cheap, sweet, nutritionally deplete foods are packed full of empty calories that many consumers never get a chance to burn off. A lifestyle of consuming more empty calories than your body can get rid of has predictable results: poor nutrition, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and liver disease.

Of course, high fructose corn syrup also wields a nasty trick that’s all its own: it doesn’t fill you up.

HFCS is produced by first milling corn to acquire corn starch, then processing the starch into syrup. At this stage, the corn syrup is almost entirely glucose, a simple sugar that’s found in most sweet foods. The process doesn’t end here, though. Enzymes are added to the syrup which rapidly convert more than half of the available glucose into fructose. Fructose, also a simple sugar, differs from glucose in two important respects: its taste is far sweeter than that of glucose, and it doesn’t provoke an insulin response in the body. Many researchers argue that an insulin response plays a critical role in sating the appetite. Foods that are sweetened with HFCS don’t make people feel full, which means that they keep eating and eating.

Plenty of research points to the detrimental effects of HFCS. One study performed by Ferder, Ferder and Inserra in 2010 at the Ponce School of Medicine draws attention to the failure of fructose to provoke insulin release. The study concluded that a chronic absence of satiety (feeling full or satisfied) brought on by HFCS prevalence leads to continued eating or overeating that, over time, can cause obesity.

A separate study performed by Alloca and Seimi, also in 2010, definitively linked the consumption of HFCS with the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The study demonstrated that both the fructose and glucose present in HFCS elevate the blood levels of glucose, insulin and triglycerides — an effect which, if sustained, puts undue stress on the liver. Consistent consumption of HFCS leads to the accumulation of lipids in the liver which can result in an inability to prevent NAFLD. The study concluded: “The available experimental and human data strongly support the notion that fructose avoidance should be encouraged in the prevention and treatment of NAFLD.”

Another experiment performed by Princeton University found that HFCS was responsible for significant weight gain in lab rats. The researchers provided one group of rats with regular rodent feed and another with feed sweetened with HFCS. The rats that had access to HFCS gained 48% more weight after six months than the rats that didn’t.

The study was criticized by some who argued that of course rodents with access to sweeter food will eat more and gain more weight. That, however, is kind of the whole point: If there is sweet, empty calories in just about everything that you eat, you are going to gain a lot of weight. If the sweetener specifically reduces the sating or satisfying tendency of the meal, the problem is exasperated.

And so we end up where we started: Is high fructose corn syrup bad for you? Yes. Or, at very least, it’s absolutely bad for the country.

HFCS is symbolic of the industrialization of American foods. It betrays the profiteering of food manufacturing mega-corporations and proves that they are as disinterested in health as they are engrossed in their bottom line.

Avoiding HFCS is common sense. Not only is adding sugary sweet syrup to every meal clearly excessive, but the health risks associated with HFCS and a knowledge of its origin both warrant a little extra caution. Take the time to start reading labels and developing an awareness around HFCS. You’ve got nothing to lose and your health to gain!