High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats 542
krou writes "In an experiment conducted by a Princeton University team, '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.' Long-term consumption also 'led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides.' Psychology professor Bart Hoebel commented that '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.'"
Re:Queue . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Glad to oblige! This story was posted on Science Daily yesterday. They included the following:
Editor's Note: In response to the above-mentioned study, The Corn Refiners Association issued a statement titled "Gross Errors in Princeton Animal Study on Obesity and High Fructose Corn Syrup: Research in Humans Discredits Princeton Study" (http://www.corn.org/princeton-hfcs-study-errors.html). This link is provided for information only -- no editorial endorsement is implied.
Re:Queue . . . (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not as bad as something else (Score:5, Informative)
Usual table sugar - sucrose - is a disaccharide made from one molecule of fructose and one of glucose. The glucose part triggers the insulin production, which signals that you have taken in calories. So, if you use normal sugar instead of HFCS, your body knows that you got energy way faster. That seems to be the main obesity mechanism associated with HFCS.
Skepticical: Study Results are inconclusive (Score:5, Informative)
Arstechnica.com covered this same study the other day. Their writeup is better than mine would be so why don't you read their article? http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars [arstechnica.com]
The abridged version of the abridged version is that this study does not conclusively prove much of anything.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Gatorade switching... (Score:4, Informative)
Gatorade in the past has had high fructose corn syrup, but over the past several months have begun phasing in a sucrose/dextrose blend. I've actually begun switching from Powerade to Gatorade because of this, even though it's 15% or so more expensive.
Re:Patriotism and Elections (Score:3, Informative)
Well, would your libertarian streak be OK with just not subsidizing so damn much corn, then?
(The government already is interfering with the system. It's just making us sick thanks to the economic incentives.)
Re:Queue . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] covered this a few days ago, and their analysis (as opposed to the publicity blurb the university made up) said the study basically came out a wash. Some groups saw gains, some didn't, but there was no clear pattern.
I'm in the "HFCS should be avoided" camp at the moment, but this study doesn't really prove anything.
Re:Gatorade switching... (Score:4, Informative)
Gatorade used to not use HFCS a few years ago. I noticed when they switched to using HCFS and contacted their customer relations department. Here's the response I got from Gatorade:
ArsTechnica Claims Research Findings Dubious (Score:1, Informative)
The guys at ArsTechinca say that a review of the actual publication shows much more questionable results, with contradictory findings between different groups (12hr and 24hr access to HFCS)and variations between repeated tests cycles. HFCS might be bad, but this research is apparently not the smoking gun. Try not to drink a gallon of softdrinks a day and you'll probably be just fine.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/does-high-fructose-corn-syrup-make-you-fatter.ars [arstechnica.com]
Also, some doctors are over hyping the evidence.
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/ [alanaragonblog.com]
Re:HFC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HFC (Score:2, Informative)
Sucrose is primarily broken down by enzymes in the small intestine.
Re:Not as bad as something else (Score:5, Informative)
Hope that suffices for starters. For more details, I'd have to break out the literature... and I am stressing my own liver with a decent red wine way too much for that at the moment
Re:Queue . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Another analysis of this from the LA Times:
A not-so-convincing case that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than sugar [latimes.com]
Re:Queue . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Sugar in general should be avoided. Fructose, which is the bad half of sugar and HFCS, is the culprit. It can only be processed by the liver, and during processing it wreaks havoc on the body's systems for controlling hunger, satiation, insulin, etc.
Take the time to watch this talk by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology [youtube.com]. It might save your life (by extending your life).
Re:Not as bad as something else (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Skepticical: Study Results are inconclusive (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In humans too... (Score:5, Informative)
How do you balance the energy budget? (Score:1, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am a physicist, not a biologist.
HFCS is fructose and glucose. Table sugar is sucrose. Sucrose is decomposed into glucose and fructose by an enzymatic reaction in the small intestine. This study purports that ingesting equal-energy amounts of one set of molecules versus the other allows accrual in the body of a larger amount of energy (i.e. fat). The addition of the step decomposing sucrose into fructose and glucose is somehow dissipating a large amount of energy.
Where is all that extra energy going? Are we just excreting extra sucrose? Does the body somehow need to spend energy producing more sucrase when you ingest sucrose? Does the mere presence of sucrose trigger some other energy-expending mechanism that we don't understand? WTF is going on in there?
TFA postulates that the 42-55 HFCS glucose-fructose ratio might be to blame. That would be trivial to test with a 50-50 HFCS concoction. If slightly rejiggering the ratio of sugars in HFCS could radically reduce obesity, it would be a huge health breakthrough.
Re:What! (Score:3, Informative)
Brown sugar is just the second (or third) extraction in sugar processing. It's still sugar, with molasses in it. Granulated sugar is not bleached, it's the first pass, pure extracted sugar from the processing of sugarcane or sugar beets.
Honey is concentrated bee barf. Tasty, but gross.
Re:Queue . . . (Score:3, Informative)
LOL, just realized this was satire. Very well done.
Re:Queue . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Queue . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Make your own ketchup - it's REALLY easy, actually - just google for recipes. It's pretty much just tomato, vinegar, onion powder, and sugar (salt and oil optional), plus perhaps a little starch to get the right texture. Buy canned tomatoes in bulk, throw a can or so of them into a blender with everything else, cook and stir until smooth and even, then put it into a container in the fridge. Cleanup is just running water over everything. 15 minutes work for as much as you want to make. Incidentally, a little more sugar/oil/vinegar makes it into french dressing.
There you go - good ketchup without HFCS.
Ryan Fenton
Re:HFC (Score:5, Informative)
HFCF is fructose and sucrose. Fructose [wikipedia.org] is absorbed by the small intestine. Sucrose (table sugar) is broken down in the stomach and small intestine into 1 glucose molecule and 1 fructose molecule, which are then both absorbed by the small intestine. So, either way you get fructose, big deal, right? That's the conventional wisdom.
But lets look further. If you eat 1 tablespoon of HCFC 55 (equal in sweetness to 1 tablespoon sucrose), you get .55 tablespoons of fructose and .45 tablespoons of sucrose. That sucrose is turned into half fructose and half glucose before entering the bloodstream. So in reality you ate .775 tablespoons of fructose and .225 tablespoons of glucose. This is significantly more fructose than if you had eaten 1 tablespoon of sucrose. And if you're consuming sugar water (as in the study) or lots and lots of soda, you're consuming far more than a tablespoon.
Of course your claim that it's "absorbed ... in the same way that beer and alcohol is. In the liver" isn't quite correct. They're all absorbed by the small intestine, but it's true they are metabolized by the liver, albeit in completely different ways. What's might be important about the liver, though, is that it's not regulated by insulin. While glucose can be metabolized by any of the bodies cells, insulin regulates blood glucose levels. Fructose is only processed by the liver and is indifferent to insulin levels. So (in a layman's, but more detailed explanation) when you eat that 1 tablespoon of table sugar, you get half a tablespoon of unregulated sugar and half regulated. Eat the HFCF55 and most of the sugar is unregulated.
As an aside, honey is almost identical in composition to HFCF55, so if you meet any holistics bemoaning HFCF and championing honey, you can tell them to screw off.
Re:HFC (Score:4, Informative)
1 Sucrose is broken down to 1 glucose and 1 fructose in any slightly acidic environment. This includes the stomach and upper small intestine. Glucose and fructose freely pass the intestinal walls into the bloodstream where fructose is metabolized by the liver and glucose is metabolized by any body cell.
Re:HFC (Score:3, Informative)
And now, with this study, we can state with a fair degree of certainty that the AMA was wrong. So now, hopefully, this will put to rest the question of whether the rise in HFCS has caused the temporally coincident rise in obesity in the U.S. (which was previously only suspected due to correlation [ajcn.org]) so researchers can focus on the more important question of why the body treats it differently.
But it won't. This isn't [nih.gov] the [ajcn.org] first [mediaroom.com] study [nutritiona...bolism.com] that has suggested a strong causal link between HFCS and obesity. This one will be ignored by the nay-sayers just like all the others. (Note that some of those links aren't to studies, but rather to papers about the studies, etc., but the links in their references are staggering.) *sigh*
Re:Gatorade switching... (Score:2, Informative)
interesting way to get past this problem is to by the gatorade _mix_ which uses sucrose.
that's why I've been doing ever since gatorade switched to hfs.
Re:It's all about the fiber (Score:3, Informative)
All fructose is processed by the liver in the same way as alcohol. That includes fruit juice.
All this changes in the presence of fiber. If you eat a piece of fresh fruit, the fiber in the fruit changes the way the fructose from the fruit is absorbed so it's not such a huge shock to the liver.
Fruit juice != fruit.
Drinking a tall glass of orange juice is the equivalent of eating 6~8 oranges, but without the fibers.
Your liver treats the massive sugar dump much differently than eating the equivalent # of [fruit].
The FDA wants to toss fruit juices into the same category of "bad" drinks as sugar laden sodas.
Re:give me more of that (Score:2, Informative)
Cane sugar is far more efficient to produce than corn sweetener but is primarily produced in tropical and subtropical regions outside of the United States.
While this is true, sugar beets are a perfectly valid substitute that grows well in large parts of the country, often in areas that are not ideal for agriculture. The top beet-producing state is Minnesota and states like California where other crops grow well during spring and summer can easily grow beets during the winter months.
If we increased our dependence on sugar beets instead of corn for sweetening our food, we could still be self-sufficient without importing from countries in tropical regions, including that communist one just south of Florida that played a major role in our protectionist policies to begin with.
Re:Queue . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Whole Foods does stock products with HFCS in them, just not as many as most stores. Their only hard and fast rules are no trans-fats, and no artificial colors.
BTW, I know a couple of people who shop fairly religiously at Whole Foods. They clued me in to the nickname of "Whole Paycheck" not long ago. They eat healthier, but they both admit that they pay substantially more for the ability to do so.
Re:Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback! (Score:1, Informative)
My boyfriend and I picked up a bottle of the "throwback" Pepsi at WalMart. The checker said she'd heard it tasted like diet. I took one sip and wanted to throw up. Which is the same response I have to diet Pepsi. On the other hand, Coke from Mexico doesn't use corn syrup, and it's absolutely amazing.
Re:Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback! (Score:2, Informative)
Funny, I just checked Wikipedia and found out that here in Europe and in Asia cola is usually sweetened with "normal" table sugar (made from sugar beet/sugarcane). Only Americans seem to get the corn syrup stuff. I feel sorry for you guys, you invented the stuff and get the worst version.
Re:In humans too... (Score:4, Informative)
It has the same number of calories as Sugar. It breaks-down in the body the same way (fructose and glucose). There's no real difference.
With carbohydrates, it's all in the timing--the slower they are delivered, the better. HFCS is a mixture of monosaccharides, which can be absorbed directly, so anything you consume goes directly into the bloodstream. Sucrose needs to be broken down first, and that can only happen at a limited rate.
Re:HFC (Score:5, Informative)
Fructose is the culprit. But there are differences. Pure fructose is hard to absorb. Fructose in fruit is released only slowly. Both are probably OK. Fructose in sucrose needs to be split off before being absorbed, which seems to limit its rate; at normal sucrose concentrations, the fructose is also absorbed more slowly than the glucose.
HFCS is the worst of the bunch: it doesn't need to be split, and the 1:1 fructose/glucose ratio is ideal for rapid absorption, and both sugars peak simultaneously, putting a large load on the liver.
So, you're fine with moderate sucrose consumption (disaccharides) and eating fruit till you burst (fructose+fiber). Pure fructose is iffy. And HFCS is a no-no.
Re:Queue . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Has anyone done one of those "Fahrenheit 9/11" or "sicko" style documentaries exposing American agribusiness and all the stuff they dont want you to know?
Yes.
King Corn [imdb.com]
Food, Inc. [imdb.com]
Re:HFC (Score:3, Informative)
Biochemically [fructose] can enter the glycolytic cycle and is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.
Fructose is only metabolized when there is fructokinase available, and that exists only in the liver (well, and in sperm). Glucose, on the other hand, can be metabolized by just about every cell in the body. This has big implications for obesity and health. In addition, fructose seems to affect appetite differently from glucose. See the links below.
http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/carbohydrate_metabolism.htm [medbio.info]
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090325091811.htm [sciencedaily.com]
Re:Queue . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I've looked at my local Whole Foods for HFCS. It's in many of their salad dressings and barbecue sauces they carry. Although to be fair, there are more trace amounts of HFCS, they don't carry things like HFCS-sweetened bread. However, they do stock and sell agave nectar syrup (and market it fairly aggressively as end-cap displays) and agave nectar syrup is even worse than HFCS [westonaprice.org].
Re:HFC (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the federal standards for corn syrup: In General [grokfood.com] and Glucose syrup analytics [vlex.com].
You'll see that they only verify a few basic things. There are no standards for the amount of enzymes, pH, other contaminants, etc. Considering it's a 9-step process, there is a lot of room for contaminants to be introduced or not removed. I highly recommend not eating it if you're reading this ;)
Re:HFC (Score:5, Informative)
Parent is about 50% factually incorrect. See the earlier med student's response for the true metabolic process.
Bullshit. Go read up on the facts yourself before you start mouthing off:
http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Time%201-2/carbohydrate_metabolism.htm [medbio.info]
Re:HFC (Score:3, Informative)
Trouble is...HFCS is in fucking everything..
Move. Here in the UK, you hardly ever see it (and yes, I'm aware of the terminology difference: we call it inverted sugar syrup here).
Re:In humans too... (Score:5, Informative)
Heh...
There's been a few other long-term studies that were done that were claimed "inconclusive" prior to this one. Most of them showed there was a serious problem with HFCS, but this one goes further to show that it's worse than many thought of the stuff.
If you're counting calories- it's identical. That's what the producers of HFCS would have you believe is all that matters.
The problem is that it isn't identical. Not even close.
The fructose is in an immediately available fashion to your body, which means it's absorbed on the spot, unlike sucrose which has to be cracked apart first. From there it lies in your blood stream until your liver can utilize it. Your liver absorbs and converts some of this fructose into it's roughly one day's store of glycogen. Once it has a day's worth of reserve, it starts converting the rest as it gets to it into triglycerides and fatty tissue within the liver (Look up "fatty liver disease" via Google...). While it's waiting to be converted the pancreas sees the sugar levels rise and tries to pull the sugar OUT of the blood stream by increasing insulin levels. Unfortunately, only glucose responds directly to the insulin part of your hormone system- fructose is largely processed by your liver and only your liver. This has the predictable effect of yanking the glucose out of your blood stream. At some threshold, the body detects problems caused by the sugars being ripped out of your system by that and starts producing glucagon which orders the liver to start converting the glycogen in it's store back into glucose. Over time, this swinging, the triglycerides, and the other stuff going on combine to provide leptin resistance and insulin resistance- which are the hallmark signs of Type 2 Diabetes, something we're supposedly having an "epidemic" of in the "Western" world.
And this doesn't even get into the traces of mercury and other chemicals you're exposed to when you eat HFCS as part of your diet.
In the end, while you do need Fructose, you don't need the quantities that the Western populace seem to consume, nor do you need or want it in the form that we're exposed to it.
Re:Queue . . . (Score:3, Informative)
It's the same reason that marijuana is illegal. The cotton lobby made it illegal because they feared hemp.
What? Paper is a more credible enemy; Hearst [slashdot.org] used his newspaper to publish lies about Marijuana, at least in part because it threatened his timber paper business. But he was just one piece of the puzzle. Cotton won over Hemp because, at the time, cotton could be processed by machine and hemp could not. Mechanical processing for hemp wasn't available until a bit before World War II [wikipedia.org], at which time it was considered desirable as a warmaking supply.
But at least the rest of the world tastes our HFCS and doesn't use it...
In fact, our food exports have been deprecated across much of the world. The EU doesn't want our GMO cereals. Nobody wants our hormone-laden milk. Rice has gone GMO as well, and our largest customers don't want it. We permit many additives that the EU doesn't.
Re:HFC (Score:3, Informative)
Even though I don't drink much soda anymore: I saw some hfcs free pepsi products in the store recently too, as some kind of special, and there is of course Jones Soda which doesn't have it. Also, the mixes from the sodastream company don't have hfcs, and their diet sodas use sucralose (splenda) instead of aspartame.
Note that in Europe, where obesity is a smaller problem, hfcs usage in food is also much smaller, if not virtually nonexistent, and most (non-diet) products are simply sweetened with sugar. It doesn't prove anything, but I see smoke, so I'm trying to reduce my exposure to it...