Why You Should Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup!

Why You Should Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup

High Fructose Corn Syrup is simply put, sugar made from corn. Back in the early 1970’s, they figured out how to digest the corn to get a higher yield of sugar out of it, and that resulted in what we know today as High Fructose Corn Syrup. During this same time, the food industry started pulling fat and flavor out of foods because they thought that is what caused heart disease. With the fat and flavor gone, they had to sweeten food to make it palatable to humans, and, unfortunately, they sweetened it with High Fructose Corn Syrup. High Fructose Corn Syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Fructose and glucose are monosaccharides, and when we see them in nature, they are usually bound together in what is called a disaccharide.  One of the major problems we have when we look at HFCS, it is a monosaccharide versus the disaccharide that we find in nature.

When you look at cane sugar in and of itself, it is a disaccharide. It is made up of glucose and fructose in a 50/50 balance. They are bound together really tightly, and when your body has to break them apart it has to work a little harder to, raise your blood sugar. The rise of your blood sugar after eating is really what causes you problems. It’s not the overall sugar concentrations, but it’s the quick sharp rises and sharp falls that give you the symptoms of hyper or hypoglycemia. When you have just those free monosaccharides (which is what High Fructose Corn Syrup is), they get into your blood stream quicker. Now it does take a bit more energy into your system, but it is a straight sugar into your system.

So let’s talk about the top five reasons to avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup

1. We consume too much sugar. Sugar in your system is probably the worst thing we have in today’s society. Overall, we are biochemically made to eat sugar. It is an easily digested food/energy source. Unfortunately where 10,000 years ago we ate 20 tablespoons a year per person, today were are eating almost 140 pounds of sugar a year per person. The average soda has as much sugar as a human would have eaten in one year, 10,000 years ago. That is ridiculous. We are calorically excesses but nutritionally deficient in a lot of different areas, and High Fructose Corn Syrup plays a lot into that. The amount of sugar we consume today is considered a pharmacological dose and can be related to issues such as Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver, Type II Diabetes, and Alzheimer's  (which is now being called Type III Diabetes). All of these diseases of degeneration that are plaguing modern society really can be heavily tied into sugar. Sugar is one of the things that we need to work on getting out of our diets.
2. It is potentially toxic. There are some anecdotal stories out there of former FDA researchers who could not get vats of High Fructose Corn Syrup to test because it is out of the realm of testing for the FDA.  So, a researcher posed as a new soda company to be able to test this sugar. The producers readily sent the HFCS over to try.  When they finally tested it, they found mercury and other chemicals that were unknown (unidentifiable), and there were spikes on the spectrograph where there shouldn’t have been any for fructose and glucose. The testing showed that there needed to be at least SOME concern for the overall safety of this product as it showed it was potentially toxic.
3. It is not a natural form of sugar. Cane sugar is a disaccharide, and High Fructose is a monosaccharide. Because of this, it is harder to digest and much harder on our physiology. I was in a lecture a couple of years ago, and the lecturer said that one of the quickest ways to get a Non- Alcoholic Fatty Liver is to eat an excessive amount of fructose.   It does change the way your body metabolizes sugar and fats, the amount of fructose you eat.
4. It is not found in the typical human diet. At no point in history have we had this much sugar year round in our diets. It is just not part of a human diet. It is destroying our health in our society.
5. It is poor food quality. If a product has High Fructose Corn Syrup in it, it is the hallmark of a food devoid of nutrients.  If a manufacturer has to add this sugar to their product, it is not going to be real food. It is going to be packaged, processed and not healthy for you at all.

So Please do yourself and our society a favor and eliminate HFCS from your diet.  The more you vote with your wallet and chose foods that don't have added artificial sugars like HFCS or added sugar, the more pressure food manufacturers will have on them to use real food and real ingredients.  This change alone will shape our culture and our environment for decades to come.

Until next time, make your health easy!