Part 1: The Results Are In…And They’re Not Good…

If you happened to have been away from your TV for the past month you might not have noticed that High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) appears to have a new press agent.

After years of media reports and scholarly articles¹ linking the increased consumption of HFCS with the growing obesity and diabetes epidemics, the makers of this stuff have had enough! They’re just not going to take it any more! For goodness sake, it’s made from corn! It’s wholesome! It’s no worse for you than sugar! What’s the big deal?

Well, as they say, let’s go to the videotape.

Sucrose, plain old table sugar, is a disaccharide, meaning it’s made up of two (di) simple sugars (saccharides) — fructose and glucose — linked together with a chemical bond. Fructose and glucose happen to be the very same simple sugars that make up HFCS. Table sugar is about 50% glucose and 50% fructose, while in most high-fructose corn syrups, the proportion is similar but not identical — 55% fructose and 45% glucose.

There is an HFCS that’s 90% fructose and is used primarily in baked goods, but the 55/45 is the predominant version in soft drinks — and admittedly isn’t much different from plain old sugar. This is the basis of the “what’s the big deal?” argument of the corn lobby (we’ll come back to that argument later on).

Of the two simple sugars (glucose and fructose) that make up both table sugar (sucrose) and HFCS, fructose is clearly the more damaging. It’s been shown in studies to produce insulin resistance in animals, and it unquestionably raises triglycerides, a serious risk factor for heart disease.

In the year 2000, Canadian researchers at the University of Toronto fed a high-fructose diet to Syrian golden hamsters, rodents that have a fat metabolism extremely similar to our own. In a matter of weeks, the hamsters developed both elevated triglycerides and insulin resistance.² Fructose also contributes mightily to creating new fat on your body.

Recently, in an ingenious study at the University of California, Davis, researchers Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope investigated whether fructose is “worse” for you than glucose (the other simple sugar that makes up both sucrose and HFCS).³ The short answer is, “you betcha”.

For two weeks, Havel and company fed a strictly controlled diet to 23 overweight or obese adults from 43-70 years of age. They measured all sorts of things like heart disease risk factors, blood fats, cholesterol, and weight. Then they split the subjects into two groups.

Both groups were allowed to eat whatever they liked, but each person had to drink three sweetened beverages a day, accounting for about 1/4 of their daily calories. Group one drank a beverage sweetened with pure glucose; group two drank a beverage sweetened with pure fructose.

After only two weeks drinking their assigned beverages, the problems with fructose became immediately apparent. The fructose drinking group had increasing measures of heart disease risk. Their LDL (”bad”) cholesterol went up, their triglycerides were elevated, and worst of all, their insulin sensitivity decreased significantly — a sign that their risk for both metabolic syndrome and diabetes had gone up.

To add insult to injury, the fructose folks gained 3 pounds (while the glucose folks did not). And the type of fat they gained was the most dangerous and metabolically active — intra-abdominal fat around the middle, the risky kind associated with heart disease.

So fructose is one of the worst sweeteners you can possibly use, and we’ve known that for some time. Fifteen years ago, the prestigious (and conservative) American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a review article by P.A. Mayes which stated that “long-term absorption of fructose (causes) enzyme adaptations that increase lipogenesis (fat creation), and VLDL (bad cholesterol) secretion, leading to decreased glucose tolerance and hyperinsulinemia.”⁴

So the jury on pure fructose is in, and that case is pretty much closed (or should be).

Which leaves the following question: since fructose makes up about half of both regular old sugar and high fructose corn syrup, is it really any worse for you than plain old ordinary sugar? After all, in both cases, you’re consuming a lot of metabolically damaging fructose. And this is where stuff begins to get just a bit murky.

Sucrose was the predominant sweetener in the American diet up to about the 1970s. But it was expensive. The reason that it was replaced with HFCS has to do with an arcane drama involving Earl Butz (the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon), the economics and politics of corn subsidies and sugar tariffs, the Farm Bill, and Archer Daniels Midland, one of the largest corn processers in the world.

This drama has been chronicled elsewhere in vivid detail (both by Greg Critser in his excellent book, Fat Land and by New York Times writer Michael Pollan). So let’s leave that fascinating political and economic history aside for now.

The reality is that HFCS is now the predominant sweetener used in soft drinks, candy, baked goods, and virtually all processed foods. But at what cost? In Part 2, we’ll look at the impact of HFCS on our eating habits and health.

References

1. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/79/4/537#R3.
2. Abstract presented at the 5th Annual World Conference on Insulin Resistance Syndrome, Boston, 2007.
3. http://foodconsumer.org/7777/8888/must-read-news/062504432008_Not_all_sugars_have_an_equal_effect_on_obesity.shtml.
4. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/58/5/754S?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=Mayes&fulltext=fructose&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT.

[Ed. note: Dr. Bowden is a nationally known expert on weight loss, nutrition and health. He's a board certified nutrition specialist with a Master's degree in psychology and the author of five books including The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. His latest book is The Most Effective Cures on Earth.For more information, click here.]

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