High Fructose Corn Syrup

I think I need to go over the basics of sugars. There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about how the different nutritive sweeteners relate to each other. "Sugars" usually refers to a simple carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are, like the name suggests, made of carbon plus some amount of hydrogen and oxygen in the same ratio as in water, 2 to 1. For example, C6H12O6 is the chemical formula for glucose, and also for fructose and galactose. They only differ in the arrangments or bonds inside the molecule. Each of these is called a monomer sugar or reducing sugar. When we join these monomer sugars together with a chemical bond, we get a polymer sugar, or polysaccharide, like starch or glycogen or cellulose, which are made up a long chain of simple sugars. For example, cellulose, the plant material that makes up most of paper or wood, trees and leaves, is a very long chain of glucose molecules. The sugar that we are mostly familiar with, sucrose or table sugar, usually made from sugar cane or sugar beets, is actually a DIsaccharide, meaning made from two monomer sugars. It is composed of one glucose and one fructose joined by a bond called a glycoside linkage. So we could say that sucrose is 50% fructose and 50% glucose, joined together by a chemical bond. High fructose corn syrup comes in many forms, but the one most often used is called HFCS55, which indicates that it's composed of 55% fructose, and 43% glucose. The missing 2% are actually longer polysaccharides similar to starch, and they're a byproduct of the manufacturing process. So, table sugar is 50% fructose, and HFCS55 is 55% fructose. The only difference is that in the HFCS, the sugars are not joined by a chemical bond. They exist as monomers in solution. Does that matter? Not really. Your body is exceptionally good at breaking that single glycoside bond. You have enzymes that break sucrose into fructose and glucose as fast as it can reach it. Within milliseconds, your body has a hard time distinguishing between sucrose and HFCS, except one has about 5% more fructose and 9% less glucose. We shouldn't ignore that small difference, either. Why am I emphasizing the fructose here, but not the glucose. Simple: fructose is the Adolf Hitler of monosaccharides. It's evil incarnate. Okay, no not quite that bad, but it is the sugar that is most strongly linked to all the health problems we now associate with excess sugar consumption. It's a very long list: heart disease, non-alcoholic liver disease, lipid dysfunctions, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, accelerated aging, gout, memory loss, dental cavities, and many more. Why are we even using it then? Yet another plot by the Illuminati to destroy people's health? Nothing so glamorous. We use fructose-containing sweeteners because fructose is the sweetest sugar. Fructose is well over twice as sweet as glucose, the other monomer in sucrose. The fructose monomer alone is about 70% sweeter than sucrose, which as I said is partially made from fructose. That means that we should be able to use a little less of it to get the same sweetness, reducing calories and total consumption of fructose. Glucose is easy for our body to metabolize. It can go straight from the intestinal wall A recent research study suggests that this little difference of 5% more fructose and 9% less glucose may have a larger effect on obesity and metabolic disease. I'd like to go through this specific paper in a separate video, because it will provide an excellent example of how to read a research paper, so keep an eye out for it a little later. Here's a quiz question, folks. Anyone remember why it's called fructose? Because it's found in a lot of fruits! Basically any fruit grown on a tree or vine is going to be quite high in free fructose. Dried figs are especially high, apples, peaches, nectarines, pears, etc. Also grapes, cherries, yams, carrots and beets. So when you see that something is labeled "no sugar added" look more carefully at the label. They often add something like apple or grape juice instead, which can actually be higher in fructose than high-fructose corn syrup. Does that mean you shouldn't eat fruit? Not really. The fiber found in most of these slows down the absorbtion of the sugar, so you won't see as much of a spike in blood sugar. I'd advise watching very carefully how much fruit juice and certain low-fiber fruits you're eating or serving your kids if you have concerns. A sugary 12 oz Coke (355 mL to my European viewers) contains about 39 grams of carbohydrate. I assume that about 20 grams of that is pure fructose. The same amount of apple juice may contain 42 grams of sugar, but may actually contain MORE than 20 grams of fructose. If you want the sweet taste of apple, I suggest you eat the skin and pulp. Other foods that are very high in fructose are applesauce, honey, pears, agave nectar, grape juice, pomegranate juice, and dates and watermelon. Some of these have more fructose, per weight, than a sugary soda. Here's why HFCS is so evil. It's being over-used. We're drowning in it, as the critics say. The politics of corn production in the US are complicated. It's one of our top exports, and keeping it in excess production is politically popular, and may be the result of foreign trade policies. We export a lot of ag products, and corn is one of the most fungible of those exports. It can sit in a silo for a long time, and we've found a billion and one uses for it. From the perspective of the environment, it's not a great crop, but from the perspective of yield it is. Farmers can make a lot of money from it, and politicians seem to love subsidizing corn to keep it cheap, which feeds industrial growth, which supports economic growth and stable prices. It also supports the obesity epidemic and healthcare crisis. Industry loves HFCS because it ships and stores very easily, unlike granular sugar which is very moisture sensitive. It's already in solution, so all you have to do is add it to the manufacturing batch, as opposed to granular sugar which must be dissolved into a simple syrup before addition. The reason HFCS is evil is because we like it so much. I'm not convinced that sucrose is any better, but it's ever so slightly more expensive and harder to add to a liquid product, and that may make a beverage company hesitate for half a second before doubling the sugar content in a soda to cover the fact that they are also adding salt to make you more thirsty. Consumers are driven by their biology, adapted to desire the sweetness of ripe fruit, loaded with fructose. Companies are driven by profit to give customers what they're willing to buy. The collision of those two motivations is an obese, diabetic country. HFCS is a problem because kids are drinking sugary sodas at a young age, and as a group we're drinking too much of them. Our fructose consumption is too high. That's not because HFCS is chemically very different than sucrose, it's because manufacturers like to use a lot of it. We could be killing ourselves just as easily with cane sugar, but it would cost us a few extra bucks a year. HFCS is just putting up hand rails and lighted paths on the road to our self-destruction. We're the ones walking along it. So how much added sugar is too much? Don't forget c0nc0rdance's first law, Never take medical advice from the Internet. A doctor is always your best bet for health advice. However, the Mayo Clinic and American Heart Association both gave the same figure. No more than 100 calories for women, no more than 150 calories for men, and less is always better. One can of coke or similar soda is about 100 calories of added sugar, so limit yourself to about that much per day or less. You want a little personal advice from me to you? Pick up the water habit. Add a little twist of lime or lemon and some ice. You'll be a lot more refreshed and a lot healthier as a result. I'm anticipating at least one person in comments is going to promote Stevia, a non-caloric sweetener extracted from the stevia plant. This is a very popular sweetener with health concious people, but I actually have some concerns about stevia. It's going to have to wait for a later video on the non-nutritive sweeteners like Aspartame and Splenda but let's just say we don't know much about it, but what we do know is a bit troubling. Stick to natural sweetness of foods if you can. If you can't, focus on moderation. Honestly, I think we all understand that cotton candy is not health food. Neither is a sugary soda. Neither is a giant steak, dripping with bourbon butter. Our evolution is working against us here. We crave the things that our distant ancestors were least able to obtain. Ripe fruit, seared meat, salty snacks. Unlike those ancient peoples, we are able to obtain these things at little expense. Now we must learn to master our animal instincts, to behave like civilized people. We must demonstrate discipline, restraint, and wisdom in what we eat and what we do. I'll quote something I heard the other day that summarized, in exactly seven words, how to eat well. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables." I think that's the kind of wisdom I can just about handle. Thanks for watching.