What even is high-fructose corn syrup? And why is it in everything these days? And why
are so many people freaked out about it? Well, high-fructose corn syrup starts off as regular
corn syrup, kind of like this. Then the corn-refining industry uses enzymes derived from bacteria
to convert much of the glucose here into fructose. Why? Because fructose tastes way sweeter than
glucose does.
Sweeteners of all kinds are expensive. And if food manufacturers use the high-fructose
stuff, they can make their products just as sweet for less money. Also, more sweetness
for fewer calories, I suppose. It's actually shocking how not sweet regular corn syrup
is. I experienced this recently when I was doing a bunch of experimental brownie recipes.
I made a batch where I replaced the sugar with corn syrup by weight and even accounted
for the fact that the corn syrup is about 25% water. I upped the quantity proportionally.
These came out flat and gummy, perhaps because of the extra water. And they were so under-sweet
as to be kind of disgusting. It was like eating a packing material.
If you want to substantially replace sugar with corn syrup in your food, you have to
make the corn syrup sweeter. And why would you want to replace sugar with corn syrup
in your food? Well, again, because it's cheaper — or at least it can be cheaper depending
on where you are. You can only grow sugar cane in very wet, hot climates. Brazil is
perfect for it. They're the biggest sugar cane producer on earth now. Here in the United
States, it's really only possible in the deep southeast — Florida, Louisiana, Texas. Up
north, you can grow sugar beets, and indeed sugar beet accounts for about half of US sugar
production. And when I said sugar that time, I meant specifically this — sucrose.
Sucrose is a disaccharide — two monosaccharides bonded together — one glucose and one fructose
holding hands basically. The sugar produced here in the United States is generally about
half beets, half cane, and its price is artificially inflated via a complex government system of
price controls and import tariffs and production quotas. "Those familiar with the intricacies
of the federal government’s sugar program could be forgiven for wondering whether they
have been led astray by their history books and it was actually the Soviet Union’s ideology
that prevailed in the Cold War," so writes the libertarian Cato Institute in their denunciation
of U.S. sugar policy. These are policies with historical roots in the earliest years of
the country, when southern sugar barons enslaved human beings and use the fruits of their toil
to buy politicians. It is not a pretty history.
In contrast, the price of corn — maize — here in the United States is kept artificially
low. I mean, corn has always been cheap and easy to grow. It is after all indigenous here,
right? But since the Depression in the 1930s, the federal government has also paid billions
and billions of dollars in subsidies directly to farmers of corn and other grains.
Corn is just so cheap and abundant here, which is why scientists for decades have worked
to try to make things out of it beyond just grits and animal feed. The white fluffy starch
inside a kernel of corn is a combination of amylose and amylopectin, which are both just
huge branches of glucose — thousands of glucose units all stuck together. When the
glucose is all branched out like that, we cannot taste it, or at least we cannot taste
it as sweet. We eat it and it goes into our system and it gets broken down into glucose
and then absorbed into our body where it is used as calories — energy, fuel. That's
a good thing if you need it. It's a bad thing if you don't.
Corn refiners use a combination of acid and enzymes to break the starch down into smaller
or simpler carbs that we can taste — primarily dextrose, which is a kind of glucose. And
that process has been around since the 19th century. It wasn't until the 1960s when Japanese
and American industries working in collaboration figured out a new enzymatic process to convert
some of the glucose into fructose. Now, the American processed food industry had a product
that was as sweet as sugar but far cheaper to make. And because it's already in solution,
it's cheaper to work in a factory. You can pump it around the plant through pipes. This
is why high-fructose corn syrup is nearly ubiquitous in processed foods, despite persistent
and well-publicized health concerns.
Are those concerns the overblown pseudoscience of hippie mom-bloggers? Some of them, maybe.
But there is some real science there too that we should talk about. I do wonder if the stigma
is why, as near as I can tell, it is impossible to buy high-fructose corn syrup by itself
at a grocery store. This is why I had to order a five-gallon bucket obviously intended for
commercial operations. The 55 does not mean this weighs 55 pounds, though it does happen
to weigh almost exactly 55 pounds — very heavy. Rather, the 55 here indicates that
55% of the dry weight in this bucket is fructose. It tastes extremely sweet and silky smooth
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Now, high-fructose corn syrup and health. The American corn refining industry has spent
a huge amount of money to communicate to you and me that sugar is sugar is sugar. And if
you are becoming unhealthy by eating high-fructose corn syrup, that's because you're eating too
much sugar, period, and you should cut back. And you know what? There's probably a lot
of truth to that. But because the industry has already delivered that message to you
quite effectively, I'm going to try to give you the best argument to the contrary.
There is a lot of research showing that fructose is processed differently by our body than
other simple carbs. And sure, fructose is natural. It literally means fruit sugar. It's
found in all kinds of fruits like this tomato. Tomato is a fruit. Good tomatoes have a lot
of fructose in them. That's why they're sweet. But just because something is naturally occurring
doesn't mean that it can't be bad for you. And very rarely in the fruit world do you
get concentrations of fructose this intense, or ratios of fructose-to-glucose that are
so out of balance.
Science says glucose enhances the absorption of fructose in our guts. So when we eat glucose
and fructose in a roughly equal proportions, we generally are able to digest it just fine.
Some popular fruits, like apples, have way more fructose than glucose in them. But most
others have roughly equal glucose-to-fructose ratios, as does table sugar there. When we
eat more fructose than glucose, the result is called excess free fructose in our guts,
which you might have trouble digesting. Some people in particular seem to be fructose malabsorbers.
Let me introduce you to somebody. This is Luanne DeChristopher. About 20 years ago,
she found herself rushing her daughter to the hospital with blue lips. Awful asthma,
this little girl had. Really scary stuff.
"She had all these symptoms. We thought it might be food related. We took her to an allergist.
The allergist said, eliminate corn. We did that. We had no results. When we eliminated
anything with the word corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, was when we had our breakthrough.
And it made no sense."
Indeed, what does sugar in your digestive system have to do with your lungs, right?
And this happened just around the time when high-fructose corn syrup production and consumption
was peaking in the United States. It was everywhere and widely regarded as nutritionally indistinguishable
from sucrose. But when Luanne DeChristopher's daughter stopped eating high-fructose corn
syrup, her lungs got better. Now, most parents would be perfectly satisfied and convinced
by that purely anecdotal correlation. Not Luanne.
"So I returned to school, got a master's in biochemistry, molecular biology. I have collaborated
with a nutritional epidemiologist, Dr. Tucker at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
And with her, I've conducted numerous studies."
I want to stress, this is not work that is appearing in earthy-crunchy conspiracy-theory
blogs. This is appearing in peer-reviewed major scientific journals — findings that
have since been reproduced by other research teams. This research shows that if you are
a person who has trouble absorbing fructose, excess free fructose hangs around in your
gut, where it is highly reactive with other stuff in there.
"It then goes on interact with your proteins. It undergoes a reaction known as glycation.
You form these immunogens, they're tiny. They can become absorbed in your systemic circulation,
travel throughout all your tissues, and your lungs have a high concentration of these receptors
that are mediators of asthma. And what do they do? They promote airway mucus hypersecretion.
Your airways get filled with mucus."
Hence, asthma, chronic bronchitis, and potentially other allergy type symptoms other research
has indicated. Now, hold on. Some people might say ... you might say, "Hey, what about apple
juice? Apple juice is a product that naturally has an elevated fructose-to-glucose ratio.
Apple juice isn't giving kids asthma." Thing is it actually might be. Not in everybody,
obviously. Scientists are still working on this. There may be a genetic component to
fructose malabsorption.
It might have to do with the microbiome in our guts — maybe things we're doing to our
bodies, antibiotics messing with the bacteria that help us to digest sugars. Nobody knows,
but kids do seem to be disproportionately affected. Kids of color here in the United
States seem to be disproportionately affected for reasons that are no doubt multifactorial.
And this is an area of emerging research that we should all probably be paying attention
to. Oh, and don't be thinking that all these hip new alternatives are automatically going
to solve your problems for you, like agave syrup. Agave syrup has lots of excess free
fructose in it.
Now, remember, I am not a scientist. I am just a nerd who likes to eat. I have a lot
of confidence in the ability of science to expose the truth over the long arc of history.
But in the meantime, some very, very monied interests have a lot at stake in us all believing
that sugar is sugar is sugar. I mean, just read the Wikipedia article on high-fructose
corn syrup. You're going to find tons of citations to studies that find that sugar is sugar in
the body. I do not reject these studies. Most food science is industry funded and not all
of that science is industry funded.
This is just the way it is, and maybe by and large sugar is sugar is sugar, but there is
reason to believe that, at least in some people, consuming lots of fructose in excess of glucose
could be a problem. And food manufacturers do not have to tell us how much excess free
fructose is in their food. It is commonly believed that soft-drink manufacturers use
this kind of corn-syrup — 55% fructose. But independent analysis from the University
of Southern California finds the fructose content of drinks is often much higher than
that, and even the total sugar content of the drinks is often far higher than what's
shown on the nutrition label. So, we don't even know what we're consuming. What we can
say for sure is that high-fructose corn syrup, like MSG, takes really, really inexpensive
garbage foods and it renders them freaking delicious. I should probably be eating less
of them. You do you. "I just dropped my spoon in there."
"Ewww."
"Alright, did you get it?"
"Ewww."