The Not So Sweet Side of High-Fructose Corn Syrup

As a nutritionist, I often get asked about whether or not High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS for short, is bad for your health. This is an important question because HFCS has replaced regular old "sugar," also known as sucrose, as our sweetener of choice. HFCS can be found in everything from sodas and snack foods to toothpaste and cough syrups.

 Sodas contain High-Fructose Corn Syrup.

For all practical purposes, it's impossible to avoid eating HFCS unless you avoid the grocery store all together, so it's natural that many of us are concerned about its safety. So, when an article came out in the New York Times a couple months ago that described a push from the Corn Refiners Association, the group that represents the makers of HFCS, to change the name of HFCS to "corn sugars," I, like many, were concerned (see "A New Name for High-Fructose Corn Syrup" by Tara Parker-Pope from the New York Times September 14th, 2024 edition). This just seemed like yet another attempt by the food industry to deceive us about what we, the consumers, have a right to know---just what exactly is in the food we eat, and more importantly, is it safe?

What should you know about HFCS?

1. It was introduced into our food supply between 1975 -1985, and it gradually replaced regular cane sugar, or sucrose, because it is sweeter, cheaper to produce, and easier to transport and store.

2. It is sugar that comes from corn-a special kind of corn that can't be eaten-different from the corn on the cob we might enjoy at the dinner table. This corn is ground to make corn starch. Then, the corn starch is turned into a sweet syrup known as HFCS.

High-fructose Corn Syrup is Sugar made from Corn

 Corn Starch is Turned into a Thick, Sticky Sweetener called High-Fructose Corn Syrup

3. HFCS is made up of two different kinds of sugars known as fructose and glucose. These are the same two sugars found in regular table sugar, but they are in slightly different amounts.

With this in mind, changing the name of HFCS to "corn sugar" isn't openly deceptive, right? Well, yes and no. Although HFCS does come from "corn," the main reason the Corn Refiners Association wants to change the name is to get rid of the link between High-Fructose Corn Syrup and one of the main sugars in it-fructose. Eating or drinking lots of fructose will make you put on excess fat---more fat than eating the same amount of regular table sugar. Therefore, we'd be better off avoiding anything that contains "high-fructose" in it, right? This would be true if fructose were the only sugar in HFCS. But, the Corn Refiners do have a point. The most common type of HFCS used in our foods doesn't actually contain that much more fructose than regular table sugar. In other words, your body probably doesn't notice a big difference between classic Coca Cola sweetened with HFCS and a Mexican Coca Cola sweetened with sugar, besides the small difference in taste. And for many, it is taste that drives our purchases at the market.

Coca Cola from Mexico is Sweetened with Regular Sugar

This brings me to a larger concern with the abundance of HFCS in our diet. As I said previously, HFCS is incredibly cheap, mainly because the U.S. government pays farmers to produce large amounts of corn. For a country that contains over 300 million people, this is a good thing because it means we have plenty of calories to go around. But, we produce so many calories per person that we end up having lots of extra corn that we don't need---and the best way to use this corn is to turn it into HFCS. For this reason, HFCS ends up in lots of products that shouldn't be sweet at all, like breads, processed meats, dairy products, canned vegetables, oral care products, medicines, and so on. In many cases, we barely notice that these products taste sweet. However, people from other countries often marvel at how sweet American foods really are. To put it bluntly, in a country where obesity and type II diabetes are epidemics in children and adults, we don't need to have all those extra calories in sugars added to our foods, regardless of what kind of sugar it is. An even greater concern about this is that children like sweet foods more than adults do, so putting HFCS in so many different kinds of food may result in children eating more than they should.

 Excess High-Fructose Corn Syrup has been Linked to Childhood Obesity

When it comes down to it, the cheap cost of HFCS is artificial. In the short run, it allows for lots of cheap, tasty food on our plates, but the long-term effects on our health may not be worth it. The fact that HFCS is found in so many products at the market make it hard for us to avoid, and changing the name to "corn sugars" will not improve this and may further add to the confusion surrounding this ingredient. What is needed are changes at the policy level that will alter the ways foods are regulated. Instead of paying farmers to produce only one kind of food---corn---the government needs to help farmers to produce a variety of fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods. Only with improvements in policy will we begin to see larger-scale changes in our eating habits---and hopefully, changes in our waist lines will follow.

By:  Kathleen L. Keller, Ph.D., Research Associate, New York Obesity Research Center, Assistant Professor, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.  Email:  kk2092@columbia.edu [1]  website:  www.nyorc.org [2]

and

Evaline W. Tso, B.S., Master's Student at the Institute of Human Nutrition, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons