The Confusing Truth About High Fructose Corn Syrup
What is it, why it’s in everything and why you should avoid it
I moved back to America after twenty-five years in the UK at the start of the pandemic. I spent most of the next two years holed up inside working with clients online, most of whom I saw only from the waist up, thanks to Zoom.
That all changed dramatically when I suddenly lost one of my biggest sources of clients right before the holiday season last year and was forced to get a part-time job. I ended up working as a shopper in a supermarket for folks placing grocery orders at home, which gave me an intimate look at what was in the average customer’s cart. Being a personal supermarket shopper also gave me an opportunity to observe and interact with customers in the aisles, to get a good, hard look at the customers themselves.
I spent the first few weeks alternating between being apoplectic and despairing as I read the ingredients of products I had known and loved as a child, now seemingly adulterated beyond redemption, and watching the customers drag themselves up and down the aisles. Many of these customers were not just overweight, they were huge. They were not just carrying a few extra pounds (though there were lots of customers like this, too) they were megafat. It was surprising after living in a country where obesity was a growing issue, but not the norm. Here, it was the great majority of customers. The occasional non-overweight person was the unicorn.
Americans have always been well padded compared to their European counterparts due to the abundance of calories at reasonable prices, but this was something new, something bigger and definitely not something necessarily better than before.
What on earth had happened to the food supply and to the people in the years I’d been gone?
This is not natural
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS), along with fillers such as maltodextrin derived from genetically modified corn, had been introduced into almost every prepared food in the supermarket, from candy to ketchup to soups to soft drinks to TV dinners. Where there had been cane sugar or no sugar, now HFCS swelled the top of ingredients lists again and again.
According to research at the Mayo Clinic, two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. And studies such as this 2022 publication in the Journal Nature show a strong link between HFCS and weight gain, a stronger link than through consumption of sucrose alone.
“High fructose corn syrup is an industrial food product and far from ‘natural’ or a naturally occurring substance,” writes Mark Hyman, MD, in his blog “It is extracted from corn stalks through a chemical enzymatic process… resulting in a chemically and biologically novel compound called HFCS.”
Unlike table sugar, sucrose, which contains 50/50 fructose/glucose bound together tightly, HFCS is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose in an unbound molecular form. With sucrose, digestive enzymes must break down the sucrose into glucose and fructose. With HFCS, there’s no chemical bond, so this substance, already sweeter than sugar due to its higher fructose content, is absorbed into the bloodstream more rapidly than sucrose because HFCS does not have to be digested. Where does it go? Right to the liver where it’s stored as excess “bad fat” (think cholesterol and triglycerides), making it the leading cause of fatty liver disease in the US. Meanwhile, HFCS’s rapid-fire delivery of glucose spikes insulin. This double whammy creates metabolic mayhem.
“Both these features of HFCS lead to increased metabolic disturbances that drive increases in appetite, weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and more,” Hyman writes.
But the FDA and the Corn Refiners Association insist that HFCS is safe and akin to other sweeteners. According to the FDA, “We are not aware of any evidence… that there is a difference in safety between foods containing HFCS… and foods containing similar amounts of other nutritive sweeteners with approximately equal glucose and fructose content, such as sucrose, honey, or other traditional sweeteners.” And the Corn Refiners association says simply and sweetly that “High fructose corn syrup is nearly identical to table sugar,” glossing over any pesky metabolic issues potentially triggered by the fact that these sweeteners are treated by the body in very different ways than table sugar.
So, how did we get here? How did we get to a place where doctors openly speak out about HFCS dangers, yet the food industry puts HFCS in nearly everything and FDA deems it “safe?”
Follow the money
Here’s a kernel-sized history:
High fructose corn syrup oozed its way into American diets on a wave of 1970s farm subsidies, and stuck into every crevice of American processed foods from the 1980s onwards, the same era of get-rich-quick yuppies and trickle-down Reaganomics, ushering in a burgeoning era of ersatz experiences (plastic shoes, polyester underwear,, adulterated food, the internet, social media….), displacing a more natural sweetener, cane sugar. HFCS entered the American diet in a time of replacement experiences, culminating in being absolutely everywhere today in an era of junk bonds, AI, and reduced corporate accountability.
In the 1970s, demand for cheap sweeteners in the United States began to outstrip the supply of cheap sugar, and, coupled with government subsidies for corn already in place, corn farmers found themselves with a surplus, all grown up with nowhere to go — literally fields and fields of the stuff. They needed to do something with it. The process of converting all this excess corn into sweetener was cheap, much cheaper than sourcing cane sugar, and the product tasted sweeter than sugar. The economic advantages of HFCS coupled with relentless campaigns by the Corn Refiners Association — targeting everyone from doctors to consumers to food manufacturers assured HFCS several places at the average American dining table, day after day, night after night, and lots of snacks in between.
By 1984, even Coke and Pepsi began to sweeten their products with HFCS.
Today, HFCS is everywhere, despite study after study and graph after graph showing correlations between increased HFCS consumption and rising obesity and associated “lifestyle” diseases such as fatty liver, diabetes, heart disease and thyroid conditions.
As Americans continue to get fatter and fatter, some physicians simply take the position that excess consumption of any sugars, especially refined sugars, is a bad idea, and that limiting all of these is ideal, a position which is hard to refute.
“I cannot say specifically for HFCS. But I have seen both clinical and biochemical improvement in patients with impaired fasting glucose, diabetes, obesity, PCOS (polycystic ovarian disease) and fatty liver disease who limit intake of most sugars,” says Jaya Kothapally, MD, an endocrinologist practicing in Willingboro, NJ.
But other practitioners, such as Kamila Veljkovic, MS, of Complete Health for Women, who specializes in working with a range of autoimmune diseases, especially Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis and Hypothyroidism, take a different stance.
“High fructose corn syrup may raise the risk for developing fatty liver disease, wherein fat becomes stored in liver cells,” Veljkovic says. “I think both HFCS and cane sugar are harmful when consumed in excess. The real difference is that food manufacturers use HFCS to add to processed foods, which are best avoided as they cause a lot of inflammation.”
Take back control of your diet
So what can you do now that HFCS is everywhere? Here are some ways you can minimize your intake:
Avoid processed foods and read labels, even on supposedly harmless or “healthy” foods like prepared dinners, condiments, breakfast cereals and breads.
Become discerning in what you take in, both in terms of the food you eat and the information you consume in regard to HFCS or any other novel food additives.
Shop the outside aisles of the supermarket where the fruits, vegetables and fresh proteins live, and only dip into or avoid completely the junk food caverns of the middle aisles.
And above all else, approach what the media tells you with a critical eye regarding HFCS. Is it true? Is it complete? Who funded what you are reading? What was their aim?
In the words of the great rap group Public Enemy, who rose to prominence in 1988, just a few short years from when Coke and Pepsi dethroned sugar and embraced HFCS as their new-era sweetener of choice, “Don’t believe the hype.”
