I find myself struggling lately with the High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) topic.
Don’t get me wrong; I get that sugar is bad for a variety of reasons. I rarely, if ever, exceed more than 40 grams of sugar in a day. What I’ve been struggling with is whether or not HFCS is really any different than sucrose (table sugar)?
Chemistry Refresher
Sugar is a simple carbohydrate which means it is broken down quickly by the body and used as a source of energy. Sugars include monosaccharides, disaccharides, trisaccharides and oligosaccharides. As the names suggest, multiple sugar molecules (monosacharides) can be combined.
Monosaccharides are the simplest form of carbohydrates. They consist of one sugar and include glucose, fructose, galactose, xylose and ribose.
Disaccharides are made up of two monosaccharides and include sucrose (table sugar), lactose and maltose.
Like other carbohydrates, sugar contributes 4 calories per gram.
HFCS Versus Other Sugars
The Corn Refiners Association will argue that HFCS is similar in composition to sucrose (table sugar). A recent article by Lyle McDonald compared the percentage of fructose and glucose content across different sweeteners and indeed, the composition of HFCS is similar to its counterparts:
Health Concerns Surrounding HFCS
I was listening to a podcast the other day that quickly demonized HFCS by referring to a study that indicates that un-bound fructose causes extremely elevated levels of reactive carbonyls – compounds that are typically elevated in the blood of people with diabetes.
Specifically, here is what was said during the podcast:
It is true that, in fact, high fructose corn syrup is far more sinister than regular sugar. They were doing a study with diabetics and they were finding a compound called carbonyl at extremely elevated levels in diabetics.
When high fructose corn syrup is manufactured there’s a reaction with fructose and glucose molecules where they become unbound and they elevate the level of carbonyls and this is obviously what’s going on with your soda.
With regular sugar, sucrose does not become unbound. The way that it’s processed is totally different.
The podcast in question is one that is hosted by an individual that I feel is extremely intelligent and well versed in many areas of health and fitness. Unfortunately, the information reported is simply incorrect.
The study being referenced is a 2007 research paper by Dr. Chi-Tang Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University. Dr. Ho’s study did not use diabetics as a control base. Rather, it was a laboratory study of commonly consumed carbonated beverages. If you read on you’ll better understand as to why sucrose does indeed become unbound if used in the manufacturing of soda.
For full disclosure, I requested Lyle McDonald’s assistance in deciphering Dr. Ho’s research and, as always, Lyle’s input was very insightful.
The Research Study De-Constructed
The original news report entitled Soda Warning? New Study Supports Link Between Diabetes, High-Fructose Corn Syrup points out that Dr. Ho’s team tested 11 carbonated soft drinks that contained HFCS and found
‘astonishingly high’ levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages. These undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with “unbound” fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, says Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are “bound” and chemically stable, the research notes.
Keep that last sentence in mind as we’re going to get back to that point later on in this posting.
The news article goes on to point out that
Ho’s group is also probing the mechanisms by which carbonation increases the amount of reactive carbonyls formed in sodas containing HFCS. They note that non-carbonated fruit juices containing HFCS have one-third the amount of reactive carbonyl species found in carbonated sodas with HFCS.
The diabetes connection is that reactive carbonyls are elevated in the blood of individuals with diabetes.
The question begs to be asked, is HFCS the problem, or is it carbonation plus HFCS that is the real issue?
Lyle was able to pinpoint a blog posting with the following information:
First, Chi-Tang Ho et al did not compare the HFCS sodas to sucrose sodas. They compared 11 HFCS sodas to a diet soda control. There was no sucrose soda control, so this research does not allows us to make comparisons.
Second, though the article states that sucrose does not have reactive carbonyls by virtue of the fact that fructose and glucose are bound together in sucrose, this overlooks the fact that sucrose is in fact hydrolyzed in soft drinks into – you guessed it – fructose and glucose.
For instance, The Soft Drinks Companion: A Technical Handbook for the Beverage Industry, Maurice Shachman, pp. 81 – 82, states:
The sugar inversion process takes place under acidic conditions and speeds up with a decrease in pH. Soft drinks are flavored with acids to achieve the sourness notes essential for their taste profiles. They are therefore acidic drinks, usually in the pH+3 range. This is especially true of the sour fruit flavors, such as lemon and other citrus fruit species. Cola beverages that often use phosphoric acid as the acidulant are at even lower pH values. In carbonated soft drinks, the dissolved carbon dioxide is converted to carbonic acid, which further adds to the acidification of these drinks. Regardless of the exact acid content of such beverages, they can all be considered to a lesser or greater degree, as acidic solutions. As such, some inversion of the sucrose in these beverages will take place.
So, even if the drinks starts with sucrose, much if not most of it will be broken down into unbound fructose and glucse by the acid in the soda. In fact, according to Marov and Dowling (1990)*, at typical storage times and temperatures, more than 90% of the sucrose in soft drinks can by hydrolyzed. Therefore, even if a soft drink is sweetened with sucrose, unbound glucose and fructose will start to appear immediately and be available to participate in carbonyl forming reactions.
* Marov, G. J., Dowling, J.F., 1990. Sugar in beverages. In: Pennington, N.L., Baker, C.W. (Eds.(, Sugar: A User’s Guide to Sucrose, vol. 13. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, pp. 189 – 211.
Based on this information, Lyle drew the following conclusion and I concur -
There is still NO functional difference in a soda sweetened with HFCS vs. sucrose vs. invert sugar vs. anything else. Put them in acid and they become unbound; carbonate them and you generate carbonyls.
My Two Cents
I myself was on the anti-HFCS bandwagon. The fact is, several times I started to compose seething postings in regards to the commercials run by The Corn Refiners Association.
However, the more I have researched the topic, the more questions I have. Ultimately, it seems as if current research is inconclusive and High Fructose Corn Syrup is simply today’s whipping-boy, same as dietary fat and carbohydrates have been in the past.
We live in a sound-bite era where context is often missing and it becomes easy to draw conclusions without having reviewed all the evidence.
I read a statistic that stated that the per-capita consumption of soft drinks is in excess of 150 quarts per year, or about three quarts per week in the U.S. When you consider that a 20 oz bottle of soda contains 250 calories and the equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar, it seems to me that we’re kidding ourselves by focusing on HFCS as being the problem.
My opinion on HFCS is the same as it is in regards to all simple carbohydrates – they should be limited as they are wasted calories, void of any nutritional value.
Train hard; stay strong.
Peace.
Susan
