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Comment by gorkish | Hacker News Reader

Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism, especially in solution where sucrose will have already disassociated. The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup.

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.

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I think the issue is less about corn syrup sugar vs cane sugar, gram for gram, and more about the subsidization of corn and low cost of corn syrup creating an incentive to use more sugar in processed food products.

I agree this is the actual issue; I don't agree with allowing the argument to manifest itself by bozos who use misinformation and pseudoscience to reframe it as a chemical/biological danger or even a taste/quality issue as it is neither of those.

Cheap corn syrup does not incentivize more sweetening. No one is rewarded more for putting more of an ingredient that costs money in a product.

"Richardson, you effectively raised costs! Here's your bonus. Congratulations!"

The heightened demand for that product may be an incentive, though.

I don't get why people act like we're talking about saffron when it comes to sugar. It's dirt cheap and costs cents per pound.

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.

So you think producers are putting corn syrup in food just for kicks?

No, ostensibly it's cheaper at scale. But from a consumer's perspective, it doesn't matter that they're using that instead of sugar. There's a much larger conversation to be had about the misinformation surrounding sugar and carbohydrates, but anyways..

No. They're doing it because it's marginally cheaper and more convenient in the aggregate, but if they didn't and stuck to cane sugar, the practical difference on the consumer side in terms of consumption and price per product would be essentially nil or close enough not to matter.

It's not about displacing other sugars. It's a cheap substitute for things not sugar. The argument about corn syrup is misplaced, it should be about sugars in general in US processed food. But corn syrup just happened to be that sugar.

If the actual total sugar (or sugarlike) content decreased along with the corn syrup, there definitely would be differences.

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.

This. Mainstream food in the US is unbearably sweet and sugary if you come from anywhere else in the world. Drinks are sweet. Chips are sweet. The deep fried onions at Olive Garden are sweet. The gravy for the prime rib is sweet. The goddamn bagels are sweet. They put marshmallows on top of baked sweet potatoes for thanksgiving.

The pancakes are sweet! The french toast is sweet! Even the General Tso's chicken is sweet!

Those would be sweet anywhere. Except General Tso which doesn’t exist outside the US because it’s an overly sweet abomination.

If you're putting more of one ingredient in, you're either giving a larger product or putting in less of another ingredient. If that other ingredient was more expensive, you have decreased costs.

Hmm. Coca-Cola may be a standout here, where sweetness is required for the phosphoric acid balance, because of the tingle that sells their "original" flavor

> Cheap corn syrup does not incentivize more sweetening. No one is rewarded more for putting more of an ingredient that costs money in a product.

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.

Re: your last paragraph, isn’t that to do with taste, not cost?

I thought the reason they put sugar in “fat-free” products is because they taste like inedible garbage without it. Because they’re garbage.

They arent adding sugar and increasing the product size, they're displacing more expensive ingredients (fruits? dairy?) for cheaper sugars.

This brings the unit cost down.

It's not like sugar is expensive. No more than a few cents worth in a 2L bottle of soda.

Sugar Price Supports and Taxation: A Public Health Policy Paradox - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5464749/ | https://doi.org/10.1097/NT.0000000000000217

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.

I'm not sure what your point is. The argument isn't that corn syrup isn't being subsidized, it's that on a absolute basis the subsidy doesn't matter. If there's only 10 cents worth of sugar in a 2L bottle of coke, switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.

The point is it makes sense, at scale, with the existing systems in place around subsidies (corn) and price protections (sugar).

> 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."

>The point is it makes sense, at scale, with the existing systems in place around subsidies and price protections.

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.

The delta does not matter to the consumer. They might pay <5% more, hardly a dent in demand would follow. The producer has a small profit margin so it does matter for them, since production and logistics cost a lot.

> If there's only 10 cents worth of sugar in a 2L bottle of coke, switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.

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-...

> 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.

While true, if this was something we really cared about, it's easily solved with tariffs. This is an actual job for tariffs.

Counterargument: the UK's Soft Drinks Industry Levy.

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...

It's certainly made me buy less UK Dr Pepper in Australia (I find artificial sweeteners generally unpleasant). Many places down under that sell it are now stocking US Dr Pepper instead, which suggests it sells rather better.

I avoid the reduced-sugar ones. Actually these days I tend to buy the little miniature 150ml Coca-Cola cans. Original recipe but only 15g sugar as there's just less of it. Portion size is just as important as concentration!

It completely killed my soft drink buying habits. So it was either a success or failure depending on how you look at it.

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.

This is a win from a public health standpoint also.

I don't think this had the desired effect for me (or maybe it did). When I have a coke, or other soft drink it's generally because I want the sugar and caffeine, for instance part way through a long drive or during a night out. Generally I drink water, tea and a little coffee. I don't really want to be eating/drinking any artificial sweeteners. I have a hunch that this is not good for you and adjusts your taste to wanting more sweet things, so I tend to avoid. Regular Coca Cola still tastes ok, but now all promotions tend to be on sweetened drinks. Drinks such as Irn Bru have been ruined, as there is now no full sugar version available.

Unfortunately they didn't take the opportunity to reduce the sweetness. Here in Norway I can buy flavoured water without any sweeteners at all, neither sugar nor artificial. But when I visit the UK all I can find is either plain water or something sickly sweet.

The industry is already a step ahead on this stuff. I'm sure they have reams of market research that say "If a tax appears that causes Coke to be $1.49 per litre and Diet Coke is $1.29, there's a nontrivial amount of customers who will skip the soda rather than switching to the existing diet brand." So they need a product they CAN slide in if the shoe drops.

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.

On the other hand, it's demonstrably proven that food producers will switch from sugar to corn syrup rather than pay extra for cane sugar, so consumers are deprived of a choice.

What good would that choice do them? You can choose to buy products made with sucrose, but ceteris paribus, the sucrose product won't be healthier. This is a little like asking whether consumers can choose to buy less-sweetened food, and, of course they can.

Jeez, at least summarize it or state your personal take-away first.

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.

Here (EU country) the same sweeteners that are used in diet soda is found to replace up to half the sugar in some common non-diet sodas, to reduce costs. Because while its not much, it's a lot more than the cost of water+sweetener. This has been an unpleasant surprise to people whose stomachs don't like the sweetener and who didn't notice the changed recipe on the label...

The people arguing against high fructose corn syrup specifically are doing so under the misguided notion that sugar is somehow healthier. You see something similar in the seed oil discussions.

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.

> something similar in the seed oil discussions

Isn't difference between oils way more serious than between cane sugar and corn syrup?

"There are good reasons to promote excessive sugars"

What are the good reasons to promote excessive sugar?

Sorry, that should have been "discourage" or "promote avoiding."

We make corn that isn't even considered a food, legally. We subsidize that using a lot of tax dollars, to the absurd point that we pay farmers to NOT grow corn and leave fields empty. Everyone is paying for way more corn than is needed through taxes, while people claim this keeps costs low (it's more, you are just paying it in taxes). And then we come up with excuses to use more of it, like corn syrup and ethanol. This is absolutely absurd.

I don't understand your point about "legally considered food". If the corn is used to produce corn syrup, it's legally food; if it's not, it has some other purpose, and I don't know why I should care.

I think it is considered a strategic defense resource. Imagine we end up with a WWIII consisting of dozens of proxy wars where the nuclear powers carefully avaoid direct action on eachothers soils to avoid the war going nuclear. International food, oil, materials and goods shipments would be severely curtailed. Corn can be used to produce, sugars, oil, and alcohol and biomass for fuel, food, and chemical feedstock for plastic manufacturing. While there are better sources for any of those not many can do all of them and be easily grown in mass in our own backyard

Any chance your coming through Las Vegas any time soon, and you’d like to bet large sums of money that I can demonstrate a high fructose corn syrup allergy?

Because there’s very few things as annoying as someone making broad generalizations and calling others “misguided”.

It's very likely you cannot.

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.

> that I can demonstrate a high fructose corn syrup allergy

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.

> The people arguing against high fructose corn syrup specifically are doing so under the misguided notion that sugar is somehow healthier.

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?

Excessive fructose consumption is more harmful than excessive glucose consumption.

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.

No it isn't. Sucrose and HFCS have ~the same amount of fructose (the HFCS in soda is HFCS-55, 5% higher than sucrose; the HFCS in food is HFCS-42, 8% lower). The notion that HFCS is distinctively bad for you is folklore.

What you say does not contradict in any way what I have said.

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.

No, sucrose is split practically instantaneously into fructose and sucrose in the gut; you have an enzyme, sucrase, specifically to do it. The process is complete seconds after sucrose enters your small intestine. The process of getting the glucose into your bloodstream takes far longer. Where did you get this idea? I've heard other people say it too; there must be a source for it.

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.

The incentive is to produce tasty food that makes as much money as possible. Food is so cheap in the US that I doubt that was the limiting factor. Like, we make cheap candy that is 99% sugar.

It's not all that tasty. After visiting Europe I always find American foods to be grossly sweet. It's a race to the bottom that you only notice if you get out of the cycle for a bit.

Because it's actually better or because of confirmation bias or because as a "visitor" your diet is not representative of what people who live their eat on a normal day/week?

As a single point of anecdote - as a European visiting America, I also found American candy just insanely sweet. Like, way more than what I'm used to, and it definitely didn't make me go "wow this is tasty". I guess you're used to what you know, but there is something to it.

You want real sweetness insanity? Try sweet tea. You will feel so dehydrated after sipping it you'll be begging for a glass of water.

I do agree that our sweet here in NA is sweeter. From a taste perspective however, it's a lot about whatever you are used to, like you say.

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.

I believe like for like on products, some food's in the US are of a lower quality due to food standard laws being poorer. Chocolate for example must include 10% cacao in the US and 20% in Europe, hence Europe's will taste different and more chocolatey as it simply has more of the ingredient that gives chocolate it's flavour. Chocolate of course isn't the only product that has different regulations.

Un-processed poultry (like breasts or something, not nuggets) was the big one I was thinking of. European stuff is higher quality in that there's less chemicals involved and it's cleaner but those are mostly public health issues (no salmonella outbreaks), not nutritional issues. If Europeans aren't actually eating in serious volume the classes of products where the differences are then it doesn't matter much if at all. And then there's all the products where it's a distinction without a difference, like eggs.

Parent is correct. American food is insanely sweet.

Take Subway "bread" as an example. It's so sugary it's classed as cake in Ireland.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=subway%20bread%20cake

I live in WNY and go to Canada frequently, I can agree the OP. The food tastes much better.

It's reasonable I think to assume that the economics would shift if HFCS weren't so cheap.

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.

> I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup as if it is somehow worse than any other sugar.

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.

But most people don't eat raw corn syrup. And the sugars in sodas breaks down into the same stuff very quickly in the presence of acids. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo

> But most people don't eat raw corn syrup.

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.

Back in the day (early 90s) my mom would sometimes serve Karo corn syrup on pancakes, even when we had maple syrup around. I thought it was a typical thing for a long time!

I know a lot of families that would do that.

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.

Importantly, corn syrup is not the same thing as HFCS either. They’re different things (and HFCS is sweeter, too).

But "regular syrup" is just corn syrup with added flavors and colorings? At least, here in the USA it is. I've not sure I've seen any pancake syrup that's made with cane sugar. Besides real maple syrup, of course, but I'm not sure I've seen any thickened maple strup products either?

Really? I guess I didn't know that, TIL! I knew it wasn't pure maple syrup, but I figured it was, I dunno, similar.

Things like Aunt Jemima/Pearl Milling Company Pancake Syrup has these ingredients, and it's been pretty similar for decades:

. 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".

You can buy pure maple syrup, but it costs more and you have to read the labels. The big brands, and most restaurants are serving you corn syrup though.

To me the biggest and most obvious is to compare Coke made with corn syrup (US) versus the Coke that is bottled in Mexico and shipped to the US. It's made with cane sugar.

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).

Fountain sodas are a crap shoot. Maybe the syrup bag is running low, maybe the carbonation source is about to fail, maybe someone switched around the diet coke and cherry coke lines and didn't switch the syrup:carbonated water ratios. Maybe the water line is too warm (which can also throw off ratios), or maybe a shifty manager adjusted the ratios to steal from the customers / company. Or maybe your ice just melted =)

Plus the whole smell == taste thing to account for. Maybe drinking from a straw obscured the smells you can get versus an opened can.

They’re not equivalent products, though. Go compare nutrition labels. Mexican coke has more sodium. So it’s not as simple as saying the difference is purely from the HFCS vs sugar.

I did compare the labels and they have the same amount of sodium as US- 3%.

Percentage means nothing. Look at mg per oz or mL.

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.

Percentage means everything, I'm assuming the serving size is identical (as one normally does when comparing these sorts of things in the context that we are).

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).

Percentage means everything, and yet here we have two things which obviously have different sodium content per mL and yet have the same %DV.

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.

Duh. Yes. I'm so accustomed to working with % solutions (weight by volume) I forgot nutrition labels give %DV.

Comparing, my costco mexican coke = 85mg sodium in 355mL, my gas station coke = 75mg in 591mL.

No worries. Just a daily reminder to always double check the units in the specs! :D

Wait, what, you think the percentage is the percentage of the product that's sodium? No. You didn't notice that one product is 240 calories and one product is 150 calories?

I forgot that nutrition labels are % daily, not % w/v.

I don't quite get how Americans love sugar so much. I mean, I I could smell the cloy miles away from a pastry shop, especially those in a supermarket like Safeway. The highest praise to an American pastry shop is usually "their stuff is not that sweet". I usually cut the suggested sugar by 2/3 from a US recipe and still make very sweet cakes. Oh, and last time I checked, every god damn ketchup contains 22(!) sugars. Why?

I remember being in the US, and the friendly family friends talking about how we would get their favorite pie, sound awesome, Key Lime Pie, and I love lime. I tried it and I almost fell over backyards it was basically pure sugar with a the slightest taste of lime.

I’m American but have a lot of Chinese friends (through my wife). They talk about American desserts with the same disdain that I talk about Chinese desserts. “It’s too sweet” vs “this tastes like a dish sponge”. I love key lime pie. I got a gigantic one at Costco and subjected my wife’s friends to it. Many of them ended up liking it!

I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for consumers to cook at home in the USA, industrial scale food production in the USA also benefits from HFCS subsidies and becomes additional lobbyists for HFCS and worm their way into recommended diets and become suppliers to public school cafeteias. We are all raised on very sweet breakfast cereals (at least in my public school cafeterias) from a very young age going from K-12 and continuing through cafeterias through college and kids have traditionally been taught fruit good but not juice bad so a lot of consumption via disposable drink boxes as well for a long time - I dunno if recent generations have been able to break any of these things starting kids off on sugar in large scale way.

It's not just the USA. Vietnam and Turkiye use lots of sugar in non-traditional foods while Thailand has included palm sugar in even their traditional foods for as long as I can remember.

Yes, though American portion sizes are huge as others noted.

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.

Interesting! I have no evidence but I got the impression that Turkiye's sugar industry (the richest man owns Ülker, a confectionary conglomerate) was unnaturally large and not always that way...

I could not find the recent article I heard on the radio but this covers it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/05/5220383... and there's a separate wikipedia entry just for obesity in Mexico, it's hit them so hard, it's like a hotbed for studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_Mexico

It seems this is America's version of the resource curse. I suppose something must be done with the infinite sugar our farms generate?

The answer is that sugar is addictive _and_ suppresses satiety.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

>I don't quite get how Americans love sugar so much.

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...

>Ireland classified their bread as cake because it has so much sugar in it.

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.

This is the ketchup you are looking for:

https://www.truemadefoods.com/

Because successive public health campaigns demonized fat, then salt. Both of which drive flavor. Only sugar is left, and sugar has very powerful lobbies

Even things that are supposed to be sweet are way too sweet, like say ice cream.

You don't need a double-blind test, you need an open your eyes test. Americans are not healthy and corn syrup is a big factor, thanks to the corn lobby, who pushes this at both ends via your tax dollar (subsides to grow it and SNAP junk food to push it). There's other factors like culture and lack of human-scale infrastructure, but Europeans, etc don't eat this stuff.

To see that a society with low levels of physical activity and high intake of sugars (of all kinds) and other highly processed foods results in some measurable poor health outcomes?

Focusing on corn syrup suggests that you think we'd be in any different of a situation if junk food were made with cane sugar which is just as palatable as any other sweetener.

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.

I believe for seed oil (a controversy about I know right about nothing) that the idea is that if it were replaced with butter that would cause the end product to be less harmful, thus reducing the overall health impact of eating a lot of it.

I didn't mean to start an overly hashed discussion, but butter is high in saturated fat. So we would expect junk food consumption to stay the same but now also have a larger atherogenic effect.

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.

> butter is high in saturated fat. So we would expect junk food consumption to stay the same but now also have a larger atherogenic effect.

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 see I was down-voted, I was not trying to argue anything about the relative merits of different kinds of fats in food.

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.

What does corn syrup cost vs real sugar cost? Does that change the equation?

Does it matter when sugar is already dirt cheap? In bulk it costs 18 cents per pound. Given that a person is unlikely to eat even half a pound of sugar per day, the price is unlikely to be a factor. Even if for some reason corn syrup is free, the budgetary hit is less than a dime per day. I doubt that's going to change anyone's eating habits.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/sugar

Look it up. They are both dirt cheap. We just happen to subsidize one and artificially raise the price of the other.

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.

> 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.

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.

> you think we'd be in any different of a situation if junk food were made with cane sugar

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.

I don't disagree with your conclusion; I am only disagreeing with the premise that high fructose corn syrup is biologically or chemically dangerous or can otherwise be differentiated from cane sugar wrt how it tastes or how it behaves when used in food. Personally, I think dwelling on these kinds of things distracts and weakens the discussion, just as it seems to be doing here.

As an Iowa kid at the State Fair in the very early 80s, I remember the fructose table in the Horticulture building (since renamed because nobody knows what "horticulture" is anymore) - it was kitty-corner across from the butter sculptures on the floor below. It was near the honey producers. They both gave out samples. I remember which table the children swarmed around (and it wasn't honey!).

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.

In hindsight I should have said that HFCS produced with a fructose:glucose ratio of 1:1 wont taste different than sucrose. It's evident that HFCS can and is often produced with much different ratios and can be anything from pure glucose to pure fructose, both of which would taste obviously different.

The HF is "high fructose" and definitely means that a good portion of the glucose derived from the starch has been converted to fructose.

Pure glucose would be corn syrup, not high fructose corn syrup.

> you need an open your eyes test

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.

While it’s definitely becoming a global problem, US takes the top spot in terms of obesity rates and actually has decreasing life expectancy. A big part of that is related to what we put into our bodies.

That's only true if you restrict the comparison to obesity rate among adult males and throw out a bunch of pacific island nations because they aren't "major countries" or something.

https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/?age=a&sex=t

> SNAP junk food to push it

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.

Maybe you’re talking about hot prepared whole cooked chicken breasts served hot in a to go container? Because SNAP allows you to buy them cooked refrigerated or frozen to take home and heat or buy raw to take home and cook.

> 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

https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items

Correct, I mean the actual, ready-to-eat hot breasts. The whole point is that health shouldn't have to come at the of convenience when there's good options right there. You can't blame a person who's working to make ends meet and doing the labor of childcare on for choosing food that is literally ready to eat over a raw chicken that takes extra work to prepare. Half the reason junk food is so popular is the convenience, and we have to set the incentives so the good stuff isn't worse.

What? You can buy uncooked chicken breast with SNAP.

> 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.

https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items

Saying you don't need blind tests when discussing tastes, and including Coke in the discussion, is rather interesting. Specifically, they are the case study for people preferring a taste in tests, but massively rejecting it by name.

Can always compare the US to Mexico. Mexico uses primarily sugar as their sweetener. We have similar obesity rates and significant percentage of chronic issues is related to obesity.

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.

Real Mexican cuisine (which is delicious by the way) has a lot lot more carbohydrates and fried stuff, especially the further you go down a families food budget. And yeah, they also eat and drink a lot of sugar on top of that and often bring those habits to the US when they immigrate.

Keep it away from breads and other similar foods and you would see a big effect.

High Fructose Corn Syrup GI is 87 and sucrose's GI is 60, these larger spikes to your blood sugar over time leads to insulin resistance and diabetes...

Around 2010 I had the pleasure of trying a bunch of American candies of all sorts sent to me over the course of a few years by an American friend, and whether it's the HFCS or not there is a permeating flavor to the sweetness that is recognizable in almost everything I've tried. It's a sort of nutty flavor, curiously reminiscent of the unique taste of Dr Pepper. I noticed in Life Savers, Starbursts, Milk Duds, US Coke, the list goes on. Practically everything. And I could discern it when comparing US and European versions of one and the same product, e.g. a Twix or Snickers bar.

> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup.

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.

HFCS is made by enzymatically converting glucose in corn syrup to fructose, so it stands to reason that the product can have any glucose:fructose ratio needed. Since humans categorically taste fructose as sweeter than glucose, it makes sense that HFCS is tuned differently for different applications and in situations where the ratio is very far away from 1:1 I do contend that HFCS could taste different than sucrose. Perhaps it was unwise for me to assume that most HFCS used is close to the 1:1 ratio of sucrose.

"High fructose" corn syrup is "high" in fructose relative to normal corn syrup. Table sugar is naturally high in fructose already. The corn syrup you're suggesting is used in baked goods has less fructose than table sugar does.

Table sugar is “Nearly pure sucrose”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar

... yes? Table sugar is sucrose.

But you said table sugar had a high fructose content: “Table sugar is naturally high in fructose already”. Are you going to walk that back?

Table sugar is 50% fructose. That’s just basic chemistry, sucrose is a disaccharide that is trivially cleaved upon ingestion. I am confused by your confusion. How high does it need to be to be “high”?

You’re right, and I learned something. Sucrose breaks down into a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose in the gut. It’s not 50% fructose until you eat it though…

HFCS is 42% fructose if it's in food, and 55% if it's in a can of soda, and in that can of soda sucrose is dissociated into glucose and fructose within something like a week of being canned, because the acid in the beverage breaks the bond too. There is simply no useful distinction to make between sucrose and HFCS.

High fructose corn syrup is called that because normal corn syrup has essentially no fructose, unlike table sugar.

Sucrose is a disaccharide formed from a glucose and a fructose molecule bound with an oxygen atom. in the presence of an acid (or in your stomach when you eat it) it will undergo hydrolysis and disassociate into its component sugars. Sucrose and high fructose corn syrup made in the same 1:1 ratio are from a practical standpoint, identical.

> 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.

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.

There's a lot of reasons why Mexican coke would taste different. Glass bottles being the way people usually drink it, higher sodium content, differences in the water, other ingredient ratios that are different, and yeah maybe a little bit about sucrose vs HFCS.

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.

> Low doses of fructose are ~90% cleared by the intestine, with only trace fructose but extensive fructose-derived glucose, lactate, and glycerate found in the portal blood. High doses of fructose (≥1 g/kg) overwhelm intestinal fructose absorption and clearance, resulting in fructose reaching both the liver and colonic microbiota.

> 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?

You're just missing the fact that cane sugar has almost the same amount of fructose as HFCS

The coke taste difference could be due to HFCS vs table sugar, sure, but it also could be due to some other changes.

I doubt it. Kosher for passover Coke, made in the US, has a similar taste.

It seems weird that they’d make a different product formulation beyond the one that matters (sugar).

The fructose difference is marginal between normal and Mexican coke. In the acidic medium of a cola, sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose, just as it does with HFCS. HFCS has a bit more fructose, but not enough to make a paper about fructose suddenly relevant.

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

They dont taste different to me, but american coke makes my teeth like dry and squeaky, and gives me acid reflux, while latin anerican coke does not.

Go figure.

it is more squeaky, you're right

> 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

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?

[flagged]

> someone who isn't scientifically ignorant or swayed by Facebook "knowledge"

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.

The argument that I heard a that sucrose does not readily disassociate, but has to be broke down by sucrase. Sucrose absorbtion is limited by the sucrase availability in the gut. In contrast corn syrup ist quasi pre digested, the body cannot regulate it's absorbtion at all. I'm not sure how true that is though.

It's true, and it leads to a smaller spike in blood sugar. It's not clinically relevant though.

Your gut can absorb about 90g per hour of glucose/dextrose and 30g per hour of fructose. This is what a competitive cyclist will consume in gel form.

It's also funny when people decry fructose and point to honey as the healthy alternative when it has more fructose than corn syrup.

While there are all sorts of claims about honey, I do think that it's easy to eat considerably less sugar without going totally cold-turkey by buying unsweetened things and adding honey yourself. Most people, I think, will just naturally use less than is added to typical products. A long time ago I decided to try buying plain yogurt and no-sugar-added muesli/granola and add honey to taste, rather than buying the standard commercial sweetened versions. I estimated at the time that it was like a 75% reduction in sugar at breakfast without any real thought or effort, and I never went back.

My main arguments for honey in some places is if you're eating local honey it might help with things like allergies.

That and honey just tastes so dang good.

And there's also a good chance that the honey they're consuming is just honey-flavored corn syrup anyway

I find that the real benefit of using honey is that it actually has a fairly strong taste beyond just being sweet, and for me at least, this means that I end up using less of it (basically stopping before it'd overwhelm the taste of whatever it is I'm actually trying to eat).

There must something different between corn syrup and sucrose.

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.

Corn syrup is not HFCS. HFCS is just glucose and fructose. Corn syrup has a bunch of corn starches and various other sugars, so that makes sense.

> from the standpoint of human metabolism

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 was trying to find words to say much the same. 5% variance could in principle be enough to alter homeostasis reactions in the hormone system. Maybe I misunderstand but the self-regulation mechanisms inside the body can titrate inside this level can't they? So the question would be if 5% variance in some things could alter blood levels over time, or how the liver reacts.

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.

But don't forget that glucose is in everything else you eat. Did you have potato French fries with Coke? Boom, you've just changed the glucose-to-fructose ratio by a lot.

Yes. There's a lot in this. And I would think this predominates. Great counter-example.

Well, you're in trouble to begin with if you're making a case about "high fructose" corn syrup compared to sucrose, because they have essentially the same fructose content; it's "high fructose" compared to normal corn syrup, not to table sugar.

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’m going to confess to some aggressive ignorance here because I haven’t gotten a clear answer. Are HFCS (any variant!) chemically identical to sucrose or only “metabolically” identical.

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.

Obviously they are different chemicals.

In soda because its acidic, sucrose breaks apart to fructose and glucose.

Yes: the two sweeteners have exactly the same metabolic impact. There is no health advantage to sucrose over high-fructose corn syrup. Even outside of soda, your body is extremely efficient at breaking up sucrose; it happens within some number of seconds when your small intestine enzymes hit it. There's a folkloric belief that the sucrose bond gives your body meaningful time to more slowly metabolize the fructose; it does not.

I thought corn syrup was all glucose, and high fructose corn syrup had about half converted to fructose.

Sucrose itself is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltose

Correct; by converting about half to fructose you get a product that is functionally equivalent to sucrose. You could take it a step further and perform a condensation reaction to chemically convert it into the disaccharide (actual sucrose) but considering it's going back into something where it would just disassociate again, it would not be worth doing.

The problem isn't composition, it's price and abundance.

> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup.

I think this is a typo? Should be "fructose:glucose"

The article is about High Fructose Corn Syrup (that’s what ordinary people ordinarily mean by “corn syrup” and HFC is “the corn syrup that took over the world”).

HFC is glucose and fructose not sucrose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup

It may not be that different from the standpoint of human metabolism but it's kind of ickey to have it inserted industrially into all your food due to corporate profiteering and backhanders. You could compare to a country like France say (I'm a Brit who visits the US and France), and the food tastes better, the people are slimmer and healthier and live longer (83 vs 79). I'd recommend a switch to the French system based on results, lifestyle and human happiness.

Fructose is bad, so if corn syrup has more of it, that is not good.

https://beckman.illinois.edu/about/news/article/2015/06/01/1...

>I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup

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.

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2020/how-high-fructos...

Table sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose; the most common form of high fructose corn syrup contains 45% glucose and 55% fructose. The article you linked just talks about the dangers of a diet high in fructose at all. The parent you replied to was talking about why HFCS was seen as more damaging than table sugar.

People are dismayed because no other great explanations for the health/nutrition crisis have surfaced. Offer a theory instead of just "no, that's not it".

> "Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism ..."

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%.

Sucrose breaks down to fructose and glucose very rapidly so by the time you consume it there's no longer any sucrose in the drink to the point that it is chemically identical to a soda sweetened with HFCS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo

You ever run a double blind experiment on that or were you knowing it was US coke versus European coke?

I knew what it was, for every can I had. As someone who is hypoglycemic I don't need a double blind experiment to tell me what a sugar rush and an insulin response feels like in the chest.

Chemically, in an acidic and water environment like a can of soda, sucrose will quickly break down to the simple sugars in which HFCS has less glucose. So unless you're getting cans only a day or two from the factory, they're pretty much the same sugar-wise assuming the same mg/L (which they might be different, I don't know!).

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.

It's the bacteria that feed on corn syrup, and their metabolic off products which differ, and take resident in ye old gut.

I took up your suggestion to search around, this came up pretty easily

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.

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