Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrleinad | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but food related: visited the US a month ago and noticed that almost _everything_ contains corn syrup. What's the deal with that? How come most things (even a plain pot of honey) gets it mixed with the rest of the ingredients? Is it because of cost saving for the manufacturers, or are there some health benefits from consuming corn syrup?

Please ignore if this comment is too offtopic for this thread.

View on HN

The US produces a lot of corn, so it is cheap. And corn syrup is a sugar-substitute, so including it in everything makes things taste more addictive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

One important fact to add is that corn is the #1 subsidized commodity in the US, so it’s artifically inflated to being over produced. The subsidies are like 2:1 to the next most subsidized commodity.

I thought most of the corn is used for Ethanol fuel and corn for anything else would be expensive. Why sell it to someone for corn syrup when you can sell it to someone to make engine fuel?

Only about 40% is used for ethanol and that's a very recent (as in this past decade) change.

The argument you make though explains why we aren't using algae to produce biofuel. Far more valuable for other purposes as called out in this Forbes post[0]. Here's a choice quote:

> An acre of algae can produce almost 5,000 gallons of biodiesel. It does not compete with food crops for arable land or potable water and could produce over 60 billion gallons/yr that would replace all petroleum-based diesel in the U.S.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/20/its-final...

Cost savings. Corn subsidies have dropped the real cost of corn so much that it’s cheaper to use it for almost anything. HFCS (and corn syrup in general) is more harmful health wise than normal sugars and one of the leading causes of obesity in the US.

One of thousands of sources on the health impacts:

http://m.ajcn.nutrition.org/content/79/4/537.full

I wouldn't say HFCS is more harmful than regular sugar, it is chemically about the same (at least the kind of HFCS used in most foods and sugary beverages). Both are equally bad. When we talk about the leading causes of obesity in the US, we shouldn't differentiate HFCS from sugar, because that just gives food manufacturers an easy out: they can add labels saying "No High Fructose Corn Syrup!" and use sugar instead, rendering the product equally toxic but making it look healthier. They're already doing this, which is why most people understand that HFCS is a problem but are ok with regular sugar.

> I wouldn't say HFCS is more harmful than regular sugar, it is chemically about the same

A quick Google search will disprove that commonly held myth. Sugar is bad, but HFCS is worse. Scientists didn't bother researching it for years, but once they did, they learned that despite obvious similarities chemically, the body processes it differently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com