Why High Fructose Corn Syrup Is Evil, Part 2

I don’t claim to understand the low-level science behind all of it, but if you watched Robert H Lustig’s lecture from a few weeks ago, this new study from Princeton University university shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: High-Fructose Corn Syrup Prompts Considerably More Weight Gain, Researchers Find. Several of the points from Lustig’s lecture return in this article, for example that

as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.

The researchers go on to show that “rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same”, and conclude that even though

“some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, [...] our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests”. [...] “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”

I’m not on a holy crusade against America’s corn industry, but that pokes conclusive holes into their propaganda and proves something that a lot of us have known intuitively for a while. I used to drink one Coke per day, thinking that by closely monitoring my sugar calorie intake and treating the soda for what it was, candy, I was still maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Maybe I was, but HFCS is ubiquitous. With the evidence mounting, we’ll hopefully return to a life where consumer goods like simple bread aren’t “enriched” with sugars anymore.