Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup prompts more weight gain vs sugar | Hacker News Reader

Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup prompts more weight gain vs sugar

princeton.edu

62 pointschaostheory35 comments

High-fructose corn syrup is poison, period. Weight gain is minor, bring on the diabeties, heart disease, inflammatory issues. The list goes on and on.

Simple solution is to let market prices dictate cost of sugar, rather than corn subsidies. We're subsidizing one of the greatest health risks of the last and current generation.

Sugar is actually rather bad for people also. Corn syrup is just even worse, apparently.

You are right, the US sugar producers are protected - they buy off both Dems and Republicans.

One family is the Fanjul family - who got some unwelcome attention when it was disclosed that Clinton was talking to Fanjul while spending uh, "time with" Monica Lewinsky.

Part of the reason that HFCS is so heavily used is that it is cheaper than sugar - since sugar is so heavily protected from the world market price.

Another reason is that it's easier to use, and you can use more of it than sugar (higher concentrations don't crystallize / precipitate as quickly as with sugar in water).

I'm undecided on the whole == poison part, though I'll do some reading. But if nothing else, more sugar == more addictive, and simple sugars in particular are excellent for skyrocketing your blood sugar levels. Shock and awe that it's used so often by junk food producers.

The video stuartjmoore already posted is the place to start. Directly addresses the question, done by someone whom nobody here is qualified to argue credentials on, goes into the biochemistry, not a pop-culture video but actually a recording of a class or seminar session at medical school, everything you could want from a video making such a claim.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fanjul_Brothers

U.S. protection of the sugar industry costs American consumers about $8 per year per person.

Not surprisingly, FanjulCorp benefits significantly (their net profits average an additional $50 million to $100 million per year due solely to the quota and break-even program.

There is a difference in that sugar is mostly protected with quotas, while corn is protected by subsidies. (although there are some subsidies for sugar as well).

So the effect is that government intervention causes sugar prices to go up and corn prices to go down. Thus, there is government interference on both sides of the equation.

I consider corn subsidies more problematic, because they come directly from taxpayer money, while the costs of sugar tariffs are more roundabout (i.e., they result in higher market cost of sugar, but are not taken from my tax dollars, thus one can avoid the cost by eating less sugar). Also from my limited research it seems that corn subsidies are much more costly than all the cost of sugar price support.

One might assume that since our government now says that healthcare is a right, they might also say that it's time to end tariffs that are demonstrably damaging our health.

Unfortunately, that's going to require our government to step up and admit that they have been grotesquely and aggressively wrong about dietary issues for fifty years now.

I'm watching the murmuring about taxing soda; I'll know they're just bullshitting us about the health angle if it taxes sodas with no sugar in them, too. (I've read the health evidence about mere carbonated water; it's a non-zero risk (mostly potential lower esophagus damage caused by excessive belching spreading stomach acid around) but minimal next to the risks of obesity.)

I don't know much about the history of farm subsidies but on the point of government intervention perhaps it made sense at some point in history but its time has past. Anyone who tends to argue for government intervention / regulation is usually pretty realistic about the need for the policies to be continuously adapting and evolving over time. It'd be silly to think we should never revisit these policies just because they've become the accepted political status quo. I'm a fan of any regulation / intervention to come with built in sunsets instead of being considered something that will stay on the books indefinitely.

Fructose in general (sugar and HFCS) is poison - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

According to Wikipedia, most HFCS in use is 55/45 fructose-glucose, so it's slightly worse than sucrose (sugar) which is 50/50 fructose-glucose.

{update} I guess it's worth mentioning also that that YouTube video was already posted to HN in December sometime.

Regular sugar is nearly as bad. Eat a lot of sugar, don't exercise a lot, and you will gain weight.

It's sad because sugar is so delicious.

The actual results in the paper are a lot less clear. Copy of paper (pdf) here: http://www.mediafire.com/?jj5henyrhxx

Thanks for posting this. Sometimes I wonder if HN should automatically replace the 'popular glosses' with the actual papers being discussed. The paper is indeed a lot less clear, although it does make substantially the same claims made in the linked article. It just doesn't do a great job of defending those claims.

The biggest problem would seem to be that Experiment 1 showed that rats given a 8% HFCS solution for 12 hours a day gain more significantly more weight than rats given the same solution for 24 hours a day, even though both groups consume the same total number of calories. While this might be a possible effect, the most likely conclusion is that 'statistically significant' does not in this case mean reproducible.

The second big problem with the 'HFCS is worse than sugar' interpretation is that in Experiment 2 (6 months instead of 8 weeks), they dropped the sucrose comparison from all the males in the long-term study! The females did show weight gain for a diet that allowed 24 hour access to HFCS, but no weight gain was observed for female rats allowed to free-feed on either sucrose of HFCS for 12 hours a day. Not just no difference between them, NO WEIGHT GAIN over just chow.

From this, they conclude "HFCS caused an increase in body weight greater than that of sucrose in both male and female rats." Sure, just not in the same experiment. And not in many cases. "Less clear" is an understatement. "Disgrace" get closer, but doesn't manage to convey my anger that the authors can do this while still remaining employed.

I find it funny that Corn Refiner's Association are running adds to try and fix their image: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbRxTOyGf0&feature=relat...

My understanding of the research to date was that corn syrup was not worse than the equivalent sweetness or caloric value of sugar. (the reason for the fructose ratio is precisely to give the same perceived sweetness per calorie). This study either changes that, or is flawed. For now I'll just continue to stay away from soda pop.

Also, if the hypothesis in the article is correct (that anything other than a <1 ratio of sucrose/fructose may be the cause of the observed obesity affect), this affects all fruit juices and probably whole fruits as well. However, it looks like bananas are about 1:1 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose ) and berries and citrus have less fructose than sucrose ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose_malabsorption )

As stuartjmoore linked, Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology lays the chemistry out in excruciating detail. His 90 minute video is well worth watching. I even got my mom to watch it.

That may be a false dichotomy, because I see two flaws in that view: 1) that all calories are created equal, and that the specific way that a given kind of sugar is metabolized does not matter. (It does matter.) 2) That the per-unit sweetness property of HFCS is actually leveraged by the food industry to hold sweetness constant and use proportionally less HFCS. (It looks like they actually tend to use more, because sweetness sells.)

I agree with others that the Robert Lustig video is well worth watching.

Fructose metabolism is affected by other factors, such as fiber intake. Notice how all of the fruits you mention tend to also be high in fiber.

I think we need a simplified "health temperature" label on all packaged foods to be placed on the front of the packaging. A simple green = good / red = bad label with enough points in-between to convey the differences. Include not only nutritional value, health risks, but also the environmental record of the companies producing the products in the rating. I'd suggest exempting companies that sell less than $X/year worth of product and really focus on the big guys. So if you were an ignorant peson doing their grocery shopping it would be fairly easy to reach for the green labels and it would become apparent that cheaper foods were almost always on the red side. That might spur the grass roots changes in consumption we need to make healthier food cheaper.

This is a tempting solution, but the food industries would simply game the system and/or lobby and pressure the decision makers.

Now the thing that really bothers me about HFCS is that it is so hard to avoid. It is in nearly every type of food. For example, most ketchups and breads contain HFCS.

We had a party on Saturday and someone brought a couple of tubs of potato salad / pasta salad. You'd think these might be a bit starchy, or contain fat, but be basically pretty healthy right? (It does have salad right there in the name)

Pasta salad at least listed HFCS as an ingredient. WTF?

This is potentially surprising given that fructose (used in HFCS) has a lower glycemic index than sucrose (used in table sugar).

Taubes explains this (sort of) by explaining that fructose goes straight to the liver, thus not contributing to glycemic index, but doing something to the liver related to insulin to make fat cells more likely to uptake the glucose in the blood. The science isn't fully understood, but it is definitely testable.

From my possibly simplistic understanding:

Insulin resistance is a factor in Type 2 diabetes, which wrecks the body's ability to handle glucose.

Once you get to this point, damage to body systems starts to snowball, obesity, kidney failure etc.

Sugar prices are supported by tariff in the US, and corn prices are subsidized. This abomination is wrecking the health of the population.

It was striking on a recent visit to Canada, that nothing in the shops, even cereal appeared to include HFCS as an ingredient.

It was striking on a recent visit to Canada, that nothing in the shops, even cereal appeared to include HFCS as an ingredient.

But still, Canada also faces an obesity epidemic.

Fructose is sweeter. It actually seems the taste of sweet alone triggers an insulin response that causes fat storage. Zero calorie sweeteners have been shown to cause fat gain.

I feel like the article would benefit from a less staged photo lede. There's something unseemly about an article about hard scientific research with a posed, strobed photograph accompanying it.

They don't appear to actually quantify the difference between sucrose and hfcs-fed rats in this summary, which is the only part of interest to me.

The actual paper is at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (assuming that URL comes through), but unfortunately the abstract did not contain the numbers you were interested in, and the full article is $31.50.

looks at Heinz ketchup packet ingredient list

Hey, why is there corn in my ketchup?!

If you're seriously surprised, you need to read more labels.

If you aren't seriously surprised, heck, read more labels anyhow.

I found out I had Celiac disease (wheat/gluten allergy) a couple years back and I've read a lot more labels since then (companies are actually getting better about not sticking flour in random things but you still have to watch out), and of all the surprises that resulted, the sheer prevalence of HFCS was by far the biggest. It's not just sweets... it's everything.

Everything.

It's very uncommon in anything labeled organic. In the US, organic foods can't be genetically modified, and nearly all the corn used to make HFCS is genetically modified. So HFCS tends to be avoided in favor of evaporated cane juice. Tasty!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com