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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I despise the corn lobby more. They ensure the high tariffs on imported sugar in order to protect the corn prices to produce corn syrup instead of using raw sugar. Only the US has soft drinks made with HFCS simply because of the tariff on imported sugar.

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Accord to the movie Sugar Coated (on Netflix here in Canada) and Dr. Lustig there is no meaningful difference between HFCS and normal sugar -- they are equally quite bad for you. Switching from HFCS to cane sugar will achieve nothing I believe if you keep the sugar intake the same.

What I believe happened is that at the same time HFCS came on the market there was also a larger push to put sugar into a lot of things in place of fat.

Thus the introduction of HFCS seems to correlate with the North America weight problem but the North American weight problem also correlates with the increase in sugar in our diet -- and I understand from Sugar Coated and Dr. Lustig that is the causitive correlation.

weight-wise sugar has only half of fructose, and fructose is main offender. So yes, too much sugar is bad, but if you compare gram to gram, fructose is worse.

As far as I understood, "high fructose" in HFCS is only high relative to the corn syrup that was hydrolyzed, but not processed with isomerase, i.e. essentially compared to corn syrup with no fructose at all.

Most commonly used HFCS varieties contains 42% or 55% fructose [1], which compares well with 50% in sucrose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Compo...

It's not the same. HFCS does not trigger an insulin response.

Just as bad is how it's made trash-grade corn the preferred livestock feed.

Canada has HFCS pop too.

All that does is make it cheaper.

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