How corn syrup took over America
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup as if it is somehow worse than any other sugar.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup. I'll be here waiting.
HFCS used in soda is 55% fructose. HFCS used in e.g. baked goods is usually 42% fructose, so it can have lower fructose levels than sugar.
High fructose corn syrup is called that because normal corn syrup has essentially no fructose, unlike table sugar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose
Fructose is only processed by the liver, and can contribute to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Using maltose instead of sucrose will reduce the liver burden.
"Richardson, you effectively raised costs! Here's your bonus. Congratulations!"
The heightened demand for that product may be an incentive, though.
Corn syrup could disappear overnight and nothing would change about how much junk food we eat, how much we produce, nor how sweet it is.
Ask anyone who's visited the US about how the food tastes. It's not just that serving portions are much bigger, but everything just tastes sweeter too. I've had people tell me they visited the states and even the plain white bread was sweet in comparison to everywhere else.
Um, sure they are. As sugar gets cheaper and cheaper, the incentives are to substitute sugar for other ingredients that are more expensive.
Look at the "fat free" foods--they've got whopping amounts more sugar than their normal counterparts, for example.
I thought the reason they put sugar in “fat-free” products is because they taste like inedible garbage without it. Because they’re garbage.
This brings the unit cost down.
Summarized (per hombre_fatal's request):
For over 80 years, U.S. government policies have protected domestic sugar production, resulting in elevated sugar prices and an annual cost of $1.4 billion to consumers (as of 2013). These higher prices, combined with federal support for corn production, have fueled the widespread use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as a cheaper alternative. HFCS production is driven by advanced technology and heavy corn subsidies, allowing it to dominate processed foods and beverages. The rise in HFCS use and overall sweetener consumption has contributed to increased intake of "empty calories," linked to obesity.
Efforts to address the issue include taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) aimed at reducing consumption and funding nutrition education. However, these taxes face challenges, such as consumer compensation by shifting to other high-calorie foods and lack of evidence on long-term impacts on obesity. Nutrient-specific excise taxes at the point of purchase are hypothesized to be more effective.
Additionally, U.S. sugar prices surged during 2009-2012 due to global weather-related production declines, but HFCS remained a slightly cheaper option. HFCS's affordability is rooted in subsidized corn production, which also benefits livestock industries by reducing feed costs.
> switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.
If this is the case, why has it not happened yet? The argument "the cost delta is not material enough to matter" comparing corn syrup to sugar, but the evidence based on participant actions leads us to conclude that is not the case.
Edit: @gruez: I agree with regards to consumer demand for the foods in question, I was refuting the point "It's not like sugar is expensive. No more than a few cents worth in a 2L bottle of soda."
I'm not refuting that, I'm only saying that in the context of public health, cheaper corn syrup being subsidized doesn't make a difference when it comes to consumer behavior. That doesn't mean that producers are going to be dumb and buy sugar when corn syrup is so much cheaper. Consumers aren't going to stop drinking coke because it costs 1% more, but the beancounters at coca cola are certainly going to care if they're spending 50% (made up number) more on sweeteners if they don't have to.
It matters enough that it determines where things get manufactured though.
> There are two prices for sugar: the price you pay in the U.S., and the price you pay almost everywhere else in the world.
> The price in the U.S. is about 15 cents a pound higher than the price in the rest of the world. That costs Spangler Candy an additional $3 million a year.
> The higher U.S. sugar price is spelled out in U.S. law. You can find it right here, in the latest version of the farm bill, which says the U.S. government shall guarantee a minimum price for sugar that is not to drop below 22.9 cents per pound.
> Because of the higher price here, lots of candies that used to be made in the U.S. — Life Savers, candy canes — are now made overseas.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/26/179087542/the-...
While true, if this was something we really cared about, it's easily solved with tariffs. This is an actual job for tariffs.
In 2018, the British government introduced a tax on soft drinks with a sugar content of more than 50g per litre. The tax isn't particularly onerous, at 18p or 24p (22¢ or 29¢) per litre depending on the sugar content. The industry response was immediate - the majority of drinks were reformulated to reduce their sugar content to below the threshold, which is precisely what the government intended. Although initially controversial, the levy is now regarded as a clear victory for public health, with no significant economic impact on industry.
Even if the purchasing habits of consumers are price-inelastic, the decisions of manufacturers most certainly aren't.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/sugar-ta...
I can’t stand the reformulated sweetened drinks. The flavour profile and aftertaste is completely different. I wasn’t a huge consumer of soft drinks to start with, but now I consume absolutely zero.
They brought out "half-sugar" sodas about 20 years ago (Coke C2), but they hit the market with a thud. I suspect that the recent "Zero Sugar" brands are intended to fill the same spot. Notice how the branding is much closer to the sugared brand than the diet brands, and TBF, they're a lot more comparable taste-wise to the sugared versions than Tab or Diet Coke ever were.
There's little case for introducing these products if it's primarily going to cannibalize their existing brands and consume already limited shelf space, unless there's some long-term appeal in it. But if there's a sugar tax, or some dramatic economic fallout that makes sugar ahistorically expensive, watch as the default position on the vending machine suddenly switches to suddenly Coke Zero.
If you're going to dump text, I think it's good etiquette to frame it with what you think that text is doing for the discussion so it's not just an exercise for the reader.
There are good reasons to promote excessive sugars in general, but specifically targetting high fructose corn syrup is like that old joke where someone asks if we should ban adding dihydrogen monoxide to foods.
Isn't difference between oils way more serious than between cane sugar and corn syrup?
What are the good reasons to promote excessive sugar?
Because there’s very few things as annoying as someone making broad generalizations and calling others “misguided”.
High-fructose corn syrup is literally a 45-55 mixture of fructose and glucose.
Table sugar, sucrose, is a disaccharide composed of 1 unit of, you guessed it, glucose and one unit of fructose. Sucrose is broken down in the gut by sucrase into a 50-50 mixture of fructose and glucose. The only difference is that sucrase takes a bit of time to break sucrose down. Not a lot, but enough to smooth out the absorption curve a little.
If you are allergic to one, you are allergic to the other.
Since glucose is key to human life, it's probably not that part.
If you have fructose intolerance, you'd probably know. It causes liver and kidney damage, and you wouldn't be able to eat much food people consider ordinary. If you have fructose intolerance you cannot eat sucrose either. You'd be pretty much relegated to sugar alcohols for sweeteners like sorbitol.
If you can, honestly, contact a medical researcher. (You'd want to be blindly provided tasteless pills encapsulating both HFCS, sugar, fructose and an intert substance, of course.)
What wouldn't be unprecedented is a fructose sensitivity.
I am not sure how true that is. I do argue against corn syrup under the notion that sugar is bad, and more sugar is worse, and I am far from alone.
> You see something similar in the seed oil discussions.
That’s quite a leap. Are you saying that people arguing against corn syrup (which was demonstrated to be terrible from a public health perspective many times) and those arguing against seed oil (who do not have a leg to stand on and are making counter-factual points) are in any way similar?
It is more prone to lead to fatty liver or obesity, because fructose is not consumed directly in the body, but the liver uses it to synthesize reserve fat.
So excessive consumption of high fructose corn syrup is more harmful than excessive consumption of plain corn syrup or of sugar.
Nevertheless, the source of fructose does not matter much, but only the total amount that is consumed.
It is recommended to avoid a daily intake above around 25 g of fructose per day for someone of average size and having a sedentary life style. This corresponds to 50 g of sugar, but with a lesser amount of high fructose corn syrup.
Very high amounts of carbohydrates including fructose can be consumed without any risk only when a proportionally high physical activity is performed, using the high energy intake provided thus (for example by athletes during competitions or intensive training).
The harmful effect of excessive fructose consumption has been used for several millennia, for making "foie gras", by force feeding geese with fruits.
I have said that what matters is the total amount of ingested fructose, not its source. Eating large quantities of dried fruits can have the same effect as eating too much sugar or HFCS.
Besides HFCS-42 and HFCS-55, there is also HFCS-70, with an even higher amount of fructose.
I agree that saying that HFCS is bad without giving more details about what kind of HFCS is meant is ambiguous.
That does not change that at equal amounts HFCS-70 or HFCS-55 are more likely to provide excessive fructose than sugar, even if HFCS-42 is less likely to provide excessive fructose than sugar.
HFCS is also absorbed faster than sugar, which must first be split into glucose and fructose. This may be desirable during intense effort, but undesirable otherwise.
You said, "So excessive consumption of high fructose corn syrup is more harmful than excessive consumption of plain corn syrup or of sugar." This appears to be plainly false.
After more than a year of Keto and not having had any bread, I ate some wheat bread again for the first time. Nothing sweet on top. Just bread (with butter on top). It tasted sweet! And it wasn't even your typical North American floppy toast white bread but just regular, proper wheat bread like you might eat in France in your neighborhood corner bakery (here they usually call it "artisan bread" now).
That sweetness went away really quickly after eating bread more regularly again but it surprised me nonetheless and makes your point on getting used to things.
Another NA example is cup cakes. There are cup cakes and then there are US cup cakes. I really don't like cup cakes at all. I avoid them. It's a tiny bit of cream with a ton of sugar. Just disgusting. They do the same with actual cakes. You can't buy a proper cake with cream based frosting and some tactful addition of sugar. It's a tiny amount of cream with a load of sugar on a tasteless body of (in many cases overly dry) sponge cake.
Take Subway "bread" as an example. It's so sugary it's classed as cake in Ireland.
If say soda were 10% more expensive, how many sales would be lost? Would the risk of losing sales justify reducing the amount of sweetener to retain those customers? Would Americans then recalibrate their taste buds to less sweet beverages?
FWIW, American packaged junk food like potato chips often has lower sodium today than it used to, so there's evidence that you can slowly adjust this stuff without losing sales.
Corn vs sugar is not the problem.
Anti seed oil memers make the exact same mistake. Since we use seed oils in junk food, it must be the seed oils making us fat instead of how we guzzle down junk food. Therefore replacing canola with butter in junk food would somehow make junk food less appetizing or something?
It makes no sense.
For the sake of argument though, let's just say they are noninferior to each other. The point is that it's a red herring compared to our junk food culture and the ubiquity of junk food.
Isn't the danger of saturated fat a longrunning myth, given the "France paradox" and the fact that high consumption of coconut oil (even higher in saturated fat) in places like Fiji doesn't have the negative effects that would be predicted if it were real?
I was just trying to explain how I interpreted the people who did argue that replacing seed oil with butter would be good. I don't know what they base that opinion on, since (again) I'm not read up or engaged in the matter. It could be that butter is felt to be "more natural" than seed oil, and thus "healthier".
Again, I'm not arguing that standpoint, I'm just trying to explain (for some reason), hence the quotes. Oh well.
Now, maybe caloric sweeteners should be much more expensive and maybe that will have a positive impact on society (like incentivize zero-cal sweeteners). But if that's what you're getting at, you shouldn't be arguing for that through a proxy argument about corn vs cane sugar.
My low effort recollection is that seed oil memers go on about how consuming a lot of seed oil leads to inflammation, and inflammation is bad.
Indeed, it looks like they are right on that particular datum:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/seed-oils-are-they-actual...
Now, their low cost makes them associated with ultra-processed foods, and overconsumption of those foods is what generates the significant digits of inflammation/health risk (as it appears you are pointing out above).
As the article points out, another problem with seed oils is that they themselves are also highly processed. So "seed oils bad" isn't orthogonal to avoiding highly processed food-- it's just a limited and error-prone approach subject to occasional exploit (e.g., some "healthy" alternative to cheezits that uses olive oil instead of seed oil).
Still, a memer's dogma to avoid seed oil probably cuts out a supermajority of the junk food found at the average supermarket. There's a good chance a memer gets bored and leaves before they even find the "healthy" cheezits! (Or, more likely these days, they scoff at the price.)
Edit: clarifications
Edit 2: I guess to be realistic, seed oil memers probably meme about any amount of seed oil leading to inflammation. Even so, seed oil saturates so much fast food (heh) that the memer dogma almost certainly would have a positive effect on overall health.
That's pretty much the main difference between soft drinks inside the US and outside the US. Soft drinks are a big part of the problem. You see lots of people getting addicted to the sugar rush and drinking that stuff by the bucket load (conveniently supplied in huge containers at your favorite fast food place).
Obesity is a growing problem in many places; but the US is where it all started and where the problem is the largest. The correlation between excessive corn syrup consumption and obesity is not something that needs a lot of arguing.
Correlation is not the same thing as causation of course. But still, if you want to run an experiment where all the corn syrup gets replaced by regular sugar, leave the US and observe people around you. Most things are the same. But you'll have hard time finding anything that contains corn syrup. It's just not a common ingredient anywhere outside the US. There are other differences. But that would be the big elephant in the room.
Sorry about the bad puns here.
High fructose corn syrup (in a fishing bobber/key chain) was very concentrated sugar. Anyone who's ever made simple syrup knows that can happen with other sugars, too. The source of the sugar might be a useful MacGuffin at best.
Pure glucose would be corn syrup, not high fructose corn syrup.
Well that seems unbiased, as I'm sure would the mitigations for the identified problems. /s
> Americans are not healthy and corn syrup is a big factor
I am concerned about Americans' health and I'm not so quick to point my finger at devil-corn. In the 90s we had corn syrup in everything but we didn't experience rapid weight gain until this century. We know that other factors can affect us (see "leaded gasoline" as an example) and we know that we're starting to see lawsuits over things like PFAS. Maybe there was some unexpected side effect like corn syrup plus 64 bit game consoles. And I'm only sorta kidding about that. It could well be a combo of factors.
Getting fat is a global phenomenon, so give me better evidence than unsupported claims that American diets are especially bad, please.
The fact that SNAP lets you spend it on twinkies but not on the dirt-cheap (healthy, nutrient-dense) whole cooked chicken breasts that every grocery store sells is one of the greatest failings of the modern welfare state.
> What Can SNAP Buy?
> Any food for the household, such as: Fruits and vegetables; Meat, poultry, and fish; Dairy products; Breads and cereals; Other foods such as snack foods and non-alcoholic beverages; and Seeds and plants, which produce food for the household to eat.
Households CANNOT use SNAP benefits to buy: Beer, wine, liquor, cigarettes, or tobacco Vitamins, medicines, and supplements. If an item has a Supplement Facts label, it is considered a supplement and is not eligible for SNAP purchase. Live animals (except shellfish, fish removed from water, and animals slaughtered prior to pick-up from the store). Foods that are hot at the point of sale Any nonfood items such as: Pet foods Cleaning supplies, paper products, and other household supplies. Hygiene items, cosmetics
> Fruits and vegetables; Meat, poultry, and fish; Dairy products; Breads and cereals; Other foods such as snack foods and non-alcoholic beverages; and Seeds and plants, which produce food for the household to eat.
Europeans also have access to healthcare and there is correlation between health outcomes and access to healthcare. Easiest stat to see healthcare performance is maternal mortality rates as it’s linked to prenatal care.
That doesn't imply there isn't a taste difference, just that nobody's funded research for this. I certainly ascribe a certain flavor to HFCS, and "mexican cokes" also has a distinct flavor. Now might I be imagining stuff, and might there be other recipe differences that can explain peoples' preference? Of course. But I'd hope there's at least some evidence to point to that's at least as strong as my (very weak and anecdotal) evidence to advance if you're going to push this narrative that they taste the same.
I know even US coke tastes different if you're having it out of a small glass bottle versus a 2L plastic bottle into a cup versus a can or even a can into a cup.
I mean ... is this serious? "Chemically identical" means something meaningful, but "from the standpoint of human metabolism" does some heavy lifting. If you had said "from the standpoint of our current incomplete understanding of human metabolism" then fine. When you say "the only difference" do you mean "the only different in the way they are metabolized" or do you mean "the only chemical difference"?
In short I think our understanding of human metabolism and especially long-term adaptation of metabolic pathways to diet is extremely poorly understood and I would be wary before accepting any blanket statements about where the truth lies.
There are certainly papers in animals about preferences between sucrose and HFCS, for example [1], and just looking at the references indicate a number of human tests of a similar nature.
I don't think the question is whether we can taste the difference or which one we prefer when blinded, or whether the difference in taste is consistent between people or stable for an individual. The question is if there are latent health issues associated with them, and I think the jury is still out; it's very hard to do large scale studies on long-term effects of these things because they can't be done in a controlled way. Many would argue that writ large we have undergone a significant study across the population of the United States and the results don't look great, although there are a ton of confounding variables.
EDIT: Note that I am not claiming that HFCS is definitively bad, I do feel that confidently stating the opposite is also epistemically poor hygiene. If I had to weigh the evidence of "appears to trigger identical metabolic pathways" with the evidence of "societies with HFCS adoption have an obesity problem" I would tend to err on the side of "HFCS bad".
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
I don't live in a high corn syrup economy. I'm not exposed to the risk as much, I'd be blovating to say much here.
I also wonder if the artificial sweeteners are bad, precisely because of biomimcry: Fooling the body into thinking it's ingested sugar could have perverse outcomes.
If you're going to be making comparisons like this, you should be clear about which HFCS you're referring to. Is it HFCS 55, which is 5% higher in fructose than sucrose is? Or is it HFCS 42, which is 8% lower? If you look this up online, you'll see it summarized roughly as "food: HFCS 42, soda: HFCS 55". If that's the case: none of this matters; caloric soft drinks are poison regardless of how you sweeten them.
I don’t think they are chemically identical because at a minimum I’ve seen the result of freeze drying solutions of both and HFCS is liquid at STP while sucrose is solid.
So if you’re going to make the argument that they are metabolically identical then go for it but be honest about what you are saying. They may be chemically similar, but so is cellulose.
Really? Because I absolutely notice a clear difference in how "jittery" I get, and the different feel of the ensuing insulin response, from a US Coke Original vs. a European ditto made with sucrose. The difference in total sugar content is a mere 2.5%.
What are the labels? Are the total sugar content that different? (EDIT: Rereading, only 2.5% off...by volume or DV%?) Because if they're the same, the European coke would have a smidge more free glucose than an HFCS-55 would have by definition.
My main issue with corn syrup is that it just feels different in my mouth. It has a "stickiness" to it than regular sugar does. I guess that's not exactly a bad thing since it effectively ended my soft drink consumption.
Growing up, I went through a very brief period where I put corn syrup on my pancakes instead of regular syrup. My parents weren't home, we had no syrup, and I didn't know exactly what corn syrup was except that it tasted sweet and was thick like regular syrup. I continued to do it just for the novelty until one of my parents saw me putting corn syrup on my pancakes and told me to knock it off.
Thinking back on it now always grosses me out and makes me avoid corn syrup where possible, but eating it raw like that honestly didn't taste bad.
You'd have a lot of recipies call for some amount of corn syrup but rarely go through a whole bottle. Mom probably didn't want to just throw it out, and the Aunt Jemima was pretty much the same with some caramel color and a few other added flavors. Might as well use up the two year old Karo on the kids waffles and get some fresh stuff for the next holiday baking season.
. CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CELLULOSE GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, SALT, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SODIUM BENZOATE AND SORBIC ACID (PRESERVATIVES), SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE.
https://www.pearlmillingcompany.com/products/syrups/original
But things which are labeled "pure maple syrup" have some pretty solid USDA standards; its a pretty regulated terminology. Even the generic/house brands are real maple syrup.
https://www.kroger.com/p/private-selection-100-pure-grade-a-...
Similarly you gotta watch out for real honey versus fake honey flavored corn syrup. Most bottles you'll find in the store will be real honey but little packets will often be "honey sauce".
To use a term from wine, it tastes "drier". And less viscous. I first noticed this as a kid when trying soda from McDonald's (I believe at the time, back in the 1980s, cane sugar was used to make canned coke in the US, while I think the fountain soda was HFCS already. My memory and facts could be faulty, though).
Plus the whole smell == taste thing to account for. Maybe drinking from a straw obscured the smells you can get versus an opened can.
https://www.coca-cola.com/us/en/brands/coca-cola/products/or...
For a 20oz (591mL) regular US Coke it's 75mg of sodium. A Mexican Coke is 355mL and has 85mg of sodium. A US 20oz has more coke and less sodium.
Your point is that US products are larger, which is generally true, and people typically consume an entire product at once, thus getting more total sugar (and water).
The percentage DV isn't telling you how much of the food is sodium, it's some reference to some "ideal" diet and food intake.
If the percentage of the drink was the same, the larger serving would have a higher amount in milligrams. But despite being almost 240mL more it has fewer total milligrams of sodium! .13mg/mL (US), the other is .24mg/mL(MX).
Is .24 == .13? Which is a bigger number?
So repeat after me, the %DV is meaningless. It's not telling you what you think it is.
Comparing, my costco mexican coke = 85mg sodium in 355mL, my gas station coke = 75mg in 591mL.
That and honey just tastes so dang good.
I remember some report about how Mexico had a very different rate of obesity from the USA until some of the free trade agreements kicked in and multinational food companies with USA branches started getting a bigger share in the Mexican market, ending up with the Mexican diet resembling more of the USA diet.
The Bliss Point [1] is a well-known factor in developing food products, and when you can reach it with a high amount of sugar, you generate a food or drink that people find delicious but aren't sated by (i.e. they still feel hungry), which makes them eat/drink whatever it is in greater quantities. This becomes a virtuous(?) cycle for the producer because people will then buy more.
Another classic technique is adding salt to beverages (check the salt content of Coca Cola for example). Salt is designed to make you thirsty, which makes you drink more of the beverage. The reason Coca Cola (as an example) doesn't taste salty? It's been saturated by all the sugar.
I highly recommend Dr Robert Lustig's talk on sugar [2]. While it's an old presentation at this point, most of the content is evergreen.
It's not that we love sugar so much (we do), but it's in just about every processed food. Go to the grocery story and try to find boxed food without some sort of sugar in it, it's a chore. Even spaghetti sauce has it.
"Subway, eat fresh?" Ireland classified their bread as cake because it has so much sugar in it.
https://www.eater.com/2020/10/1/21496848/irish-supreme-court...
As another poster mention, add salt and fat and you break the satiety mechanism in our brains.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/26/172969363/ho...
Which is fascinating when you consider that refined flour, used to make most breads, breaks down to 70%+ glucose (the sugar thing that is the cause of enormous health consequences). Sugar/sucrose only breaks down to 50% glucose (the rest fructose that the body purges). So you literally get less blood sugar when you replace flour with an equal quantity of sucrose/sugar.
Somewhere else in here someone mentioned that bread in the US tastes sweet, and again if you put white bread on your tongue, it is basically sugar. Your enzymes immediately start cracking the simple carbs into glucose molecules. This basic of chemistry is true worldwide.
The focus on sugars in particular might be a bit misleading and something that will be seen as an error in nutrition advice. People choose low or artificial sugar options that are instead simple carbohydrates, not realizing that they are quite literally eating worse than the equivalent amount of sugar.
there is good reason to be furious at corn syrup because low income 3rd world countries would love to sell the US their cane sugar at very cheap prices, but the US govt controls prices artificially high to protect US sugar growers.
I have a corn intolerance where corn and corn byproducts trigger a migraine type headache.
I assume there must be corn byproducts in corn syrup because it absolutely triggers my corn reaction, but cane sugar does not.
Also from a purely taste standpoint there is a big difference to me as well.
Lastly, you can’t make peanut brittle chewy without corn syrup, with sugar alone (which is how I make it) it’s very crunchy.
I think this is a typo? Should be "fructose:glucose"
HFC is glucose and fructose not sucrose.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/
The effect of high-fructose corn syrup vs. sucrose on anthropometric and metabolic parameters: A systematic review and meta-analysis
> We found that HFCS was significantly associated with an increased CRP level, compared to sucrose. [...]
> CRP is a biomarker for inflammation; and several previous investigations have shown that fructose-containing sweeteners,[...]
Can you explain why their finding is invalid or how it does not contradict your claim (Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm not an expert in the field I don't pretend to be able to understand the subject.
> In many microbes, fructose is phosphorylated on its 6-position and thereby follows nearly the same metabolic pathway as glucose. In mammals, however, fructose phosphorylation occurs on the 1-position, not 6-position, catalyzed by the enzyme ketohexokinase (Khk) (Heinz et al., 1968). The location of this initial phosphorylation is a pivotal difference, as fructose 1-phosphate (F1P) can be directly cleaved into three-carbon units, whereas F6P must be phosphorylated on its 1-position by phosphofructokinase, the most heavily regulated enzyme of glycolysis, before such cleavage. Thus, fructose bypasses the gating step of glycolysis.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032988/
"try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup"
are you not able to tell the difference between regular coke and mexican coke?
The coke taste difference could be due to HFCS vs table sugar, sure, but it also could be due to some other changes.
It seems weird that they’d make a different product formulation beyond the one that matters (sugar).
As to the taste difference, Mexican cola has double the sodium. But even then, most people cannot taste the difference. They think they can, proclaim they can, and talk up how great Mexican coke is, but when actually put to the test they have basically random odds of being right or not.
Fructose is mostly considered benign if consumed in moderation. You can get fatty liver if you consume to excess, but for most people it has no caloric value and is excreted from the body as a non-nutritive sweetener.
Good related video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
Go figure.
Let's set this up. I'm 100% sure I can tell the difference. I grew up in france drinking the sucrose version and I can definitely tell when I'm having a taste of my childhood vs. not. I think what you're trying to say is that you can't tell the difference.
Next you'll be telling me that I can't smell the vomit (butyrate) in Hershey's chocolate from the next room over?
Straw man, I shared an article earlier about fructose skipping a step in the breakdown of glycolysis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42695820. These reviews highlight the different effects of fructose and glucose on serum lipids https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2682989/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8213607/. But yeah I guess I'm just a scientifically ignorant phd
With regards to taste, if there are other differences in the formulation Mexican vs US coke then that's another thing, but the difference is definitely noticeable.
> they more often than not chose the American coke as the better tasting coke
Probably because they grew up with it. People usually like what they are used to. This has to be controlled for. Do the same study with Mexican or European person.
> rationally understand they both are just glucose and fructose in a drink like a cola, in slightly different ratios
if they are so similar then that's even more impressive, because they definitely taste different.
> I have never had Mexican coke, to my knowledge
Maybe give it a try, just in case you can taste the difference.
By the way, taste is important. Warren Buffett famously described how the taste of Coke doesn't linger in your mouth, making you want to drink "3, 4, 5+ Cokes each day". Can't find the original document right now but here is the excerpt: https://x.com/EugeneNg_VCap/status/1652253327034560532.
This is part of the basis of his investment in Coca Cola. It would be interesting to figure out whether this is affected by the choice of sugar.
https://beckman.illinois.edu/about/news/article/2015/06/01/1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
If I might summarize.
Your body can absorb three types of sugar into the blood, glucose, fructose and galactose. glucose is directly used by cells, the other two have to take a trip through the liver to turn them into glucose.
Table sugar is sucrose. a complex sugar. which can be best thought of as a fructose and a glucose linked together.
Corn syrup is a mixture of ~ 45% glucose 55% fructose
Sucrose is quickly broken apart into glucose and fructose in several environments, high heat will do it, but also acidic environments. like your stomach, or a soda. a soda will be slightly acidic due to the carbon dioxide dissolved in it(carbonic acid). And some formulations(like coke) add additional phosphoric acid.
And to spoil the video. Even if you put sucrose into a soda, that is not what you are going to be drinking. I was unable to figure out why it tastes different, are the ratios off? additional trace chemicals in one source?
Turns out the trick is super super simple: It's not the sugar; it's the salt. It's on the label.
The soda brands that have been differentiating their cane sugar products, such as the various "throwback" promotional drinks or "Mexican Coke" all have measurably more salt in the cane sugar versions which tends to enhance the flavors for all the same reasons that salt does that in every other food. If you want your corn syrup american coke to have that south of the border $8 imported flair, put about half a pinch of salt in it. It will taste the same, except you won't get to drink it out of the tall glass bottle.
Arguably the most important part. Plastic bottle soda tastes terrible.
A thermometer might report the same temperature, doesn’t matter. Kinda like how smell influences taste so much, the heat conduction of the container changes my perception of how cold the contents are.
And yeah, I realize that a glass bottle or aluminum can is actually transferring more heat into the soda. It’s weird, but I just hate drinking from a plastic soda bottle so much.
- European Coke has zero salt/sodium.
- USA Coke has 75mg per 20 US Fl Oz, which is 127mg per litre.
- Mexican Coke has 130mg per litre.
US: https://www.coca-cola.com/us/en/brands/coca-cola/products/or...
UK: https://www.coca-cola.com/gb/en/brands/coca-cola-original-ta... (and a quick check shows it's the same in Germany)
Mexico: https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/769110/100g/1
US vs Mexican Doritos are a good example. The bags look identical, but the US version is cheesier and the Mexican version has a mild kick of lime. Yet you wouldn't glean this from the nutrition label.
https://stopandshop.com/groceries/beverages/soft-drinks/cola...
https://stopandshop.com/groceries/beverages/soft-drinks/cola...
Politicians in the states where corn doesn't rule everything are nevertheless limited in what they can do to combat these trends, since their political opponents are happy to use hunger as a weapon if they can.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22656777
https://www.essence.com/news/new-trump-administration-propos...
And "bowing to your partner" is not sophisticated. It's just the custom. Promenade!
`Everclear is also used as a household "food-grade" cleaner, disinfectant, or stove fuel alcohol`
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everclear
It's not very palatable orally, but butt-chugging is really not advised.
I'm being downvoted here because the prigs on Hacker News (see https://paulgraham.com/woke.html) like to say that HFCS is evil and anyone who doesn't hate it is beneath contempt. A very predictable reaction.
So, basically American's money is going in the pocket of big corporation thanks to corrupt politicians.
And it's still going on to these days, no government has yet removed these tariffs.
Isn't tariff what started the American revolution ? Things changed.
I'm not sure that more cheap sugar is a good thing
The price of HFCS is cheaper than US-produced sugar, but is more expensive than the international market for sugar.
The US puts the tariff on international sugar and subsidizes corn so that both the US sugar farmers, the corn farmers, and the giant industrial food manufacturers all win. The consumer loses due to all the subsidized corn syrup going into the food.
Having to pay extra so industrial and subsidized corn farmer can get rich, on the other hand it is not normal. Beside it promotes this political environment where politicians are expected to receive kickback in exchange for service.
Corn syrup is mostly glucose. HFCS is when you use enzymes to convert a lot of that glucose into fructose.
I would consider myself over my allergy. I'd say it lasted seven years, gradually diminishing in severity over time.
For the first couple years following the diagnosis my parents had me eating spelt, kamut, quinoa and all that. Alternative recipe books, bag lunch, Martin's potato bread, health food store, no vending machines, no trick or treat candy, and we checked the ingredients on every box. But like you said, HFCS is practically unavoidable. My parents made some judgment calls— they checked my reaction to corn starch and plain old corn, and I had none. The alternative grains went away, we were just ingredient checking and keeping my corn intake relatively low. Five years in, I was eating the same stuff other kids ate as long as it wasn't sugary like pancake syrup or a cinnamon bun. Then after puberty corn syrup was the bad grade scapegoat and nothing more.
Nowadays I will demolish a bowl of Honey Comb cereal— basically corn flour hexagons. I read the nutrition facts and ignore the ingredients list; my childhood allergy doesn't even enter my mind. Arrowhead Mills spelt flakes are delicious, though.
Your sister's a completely different jumble of molecules, and my experience might not apply, but I would recommend a similar approach my family took: switch to boring food for a year or two, even in the tricky social situations surrounding food. Then, talk to the allergist (or don't) about safely testing subcategories of corn product. The worst offenders are probably the sweeteners. I hope corn flour makes it back on her menu, but if not, I imagine now is a great time to be allergic and on the Internet.
And yet if you regularly read HN you get the impression the mean BMI of commenters is in the obese range and many HNers are on GLP-1s.