Why high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in US
shkrobius.livejournal.com
shkrobius.livejournal.com
But it gets worse. Because there is a second layer of beneficiaries here. Corn growers. And they have great political power, as is seen in the subsidies they get and the ethanol additives that are legally require (which damage engines, and are a net negative on energy once you consider the costs of growing that corn).
Not the least among the advantages that corn growers have politically is the simple fact that they are important in Iowa. Which means that any national politician who dreams of being President, or of working with any other that has that dream, has very direct incentives to keep corn growers happy.
Because it starts with an 'I'.
The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not which sugar is being used.
HFCS alarmism probably works to the advantage of junk food companies, who can simply market equally unhealthful products built on table sugar as a premium alternative.
That's fine, let them try. It would equalize the market among these players and those who are already not using HFCS.
They would now have choice. Why is it the role of government to exclude entrepreneurs from competing?
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/survival-strat...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/
Evidence that sugar is addictive in the same way as are narcotics and cancer cells in blood with elevated sugar grow much faster.
Both sugar and corn are heavily subsidized, but sugar AFAIK is subsidized by tariffs (i.e. higher prices for the consumer) and corn by transfers. I have no idea why - probably "biofuels" fiasco has a lot to do with it, but not sure if it is the main cause.
>>> for the government to stop making drastic declarations in nutrition that can lead to these really strange and unexpected consequences.
You mean, the government to stop regulating what we eat and trying to protect us from ourselves? Fat chance.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
People have a fsckin' right to eat unhealthy and who the hell are you to fix prices of their food so that they can't?
That's one thing. Another one is that such schemes are really, pragmatically bad as they make people involved in them make political decisions which protect their unfair advantage at the cost of goals important to the general public. Do you really want people to vote for whomever promises to pass bills giving them most benefits at the cost of others? Well, I know that people sometimes do that anyway, but IMO it shouldn't be encouraged with successful examples lasting for two centuries.
And at last - people are pretty capable of getting what they want. If you make it slightly more expensive, they'll simply pay. More expensive - they'll switch to worse alternatives (HFCS, anyone?). Even more - illegal production. Outright ban - sugar mafia. I mean, the US already tried to "fight alcoholism" some time ago and it almost worked.
"If you make it slightly more expensive, they'll simply pay" does not seem like a statement that comports with economics.
Message boards are fertile grounds for thought experiments.
They do not. Obesity, most especially childhood obesity, puts the sufferer at risk to all kinds of nastiness that doesn't kill you outright but is very expensive to treat. I have the right to keep the morbidly obese out of my wallet.
So on the consumer end, as far as consumers are taxpayers, it would have meant paying for zero support programs instead of two. If you want to go out on a limb, cheaper ethanol leads to cheaper petrol due to a substitution effect, so potentially it would have made all food products marginally cheaper thanks to lower shipping costs.
The linked article is a good one though. It is a funny subject to bring up in the bureaucracy because as economists, we all knew the harm it did, but as bureaucrats, we also knew that the policy wasn't going anywhere.
You mean might improve profits for junk food companies?
You [and everyone else] should watch this if you haven't. Amazing lecture and aligns with what you've said.
But it appears that there's still some particularly negative effects of HFCS relative to more typical sugars, too: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
While I can't really argue against you, partially because you're tptacek and partially because you're not wrong here, it's quite irritating to see somebody have a good conclusion and faulty premises.
Also, stop with the scare quotes.
Also: what scare quotes?
I guess an argument could be made that fast-acting monosaccharides are more problematic for diabetics since their bodies can't deal with spikes easily, but for the rest of us there is really no (scientifically accessible) difference at all. Our food just contains too much readily accessible energy.
http://news.yale.edu/2013/01/04/study-suggests-effect-fructo...
The second article says, in its abstract, "However, when HFCS is compared with sucrose, the more commonly consumed sweetener, such differences are not apparent, and appetite and energy intake do not differ in the short-term. Longer-term studies on connections between HFCS, potential mechanisms, and body weight have not been conducted".
one thing that really bothers me though is that having grown up in germany i have big problems swallowing hfcs. mostly because it tastes dull, and feels very acidic in my throat. i've asked other people from overseas and they reported similar things.
the only thing I could find though is the addition of sulfuric acid. if you have some information on that, i'd be grateful.
If you're diabetic, having fruit juice handy during an insulin reaction is preferable to having a sucrose-based product, IIRC. (I had a family member who was diabetic, although it's been many years since they passed.)
They aren't. The enzyme sucrase is needed to break it down but it cuts through sucrose like a hot knife through butter.
Scientists have already studied this and found sucrose and HFCS have basically equivalent responses in "blood glucose, insulin, leptin, ghrelin, and appetite."
http://examine.com/faq/is-hfcs-high-fructose-corn-syrup-wors...
Actually, table sugar is sucrose, a different compound to fructose. Fructose absorption is actually faster in 1:1 fructose:glucose mixes.
So there are differences in the metabolism of fructose in the two situations, even if minor, and as a general point of chemistry it's not really correct to say that table sugar is half sucrose any more than it's correct to say alcohol is half methane.
But in general yes, HFCS as a substance is not the problem. HFCS as a subsidized foodstuff that gets wedged into too many things, that's the issue.
It's also far from the first thing that happens during the digestive process, as it takes place in the duodenum. If you ate a 1:1 mixture of glucose/fructose they would be present higher up the digestive system. Fructose also absorbs faster in the 1:1 proportion than in other proportions.
I'm not saying Sucrose Good/HFCS Bad (could be the other ay around for all I know), just that there are differences.
Why do I have a particular distaste for HFCS? I remember a time when Americans would come to Canada and say, "where are all your fat people?" Our local newspapers would run stories about how Americans perceive our "indulgent" culture. You don't see those stories anymore. Now we're toe-to-toe in (childhood) obesity, diabetes. Data shows that the US started to use HFCS in liquids and baked goods as early as the 1970s. Canada on the other hand, HFCS has only recently become a regular ingredient in food. I know this is anecdotal and not in anyway scientific, but I have to wonder what other trend could have caused increases in caloric consumption at this magnitude. My understanding is that cane sugar is processed by every cell in your body and HFCS is processed by only your liver. The liver allegedly becomes overworked. If true, this domino effect has grave consequences.
To your correlation/causation point, why don't you think that this is the result of having massive, inexpensive, and domestic sources of a molecule that makes the human brain want to eat more? Rather than some minor distinction in the ratio of the monosaccharides its composed of?
Sugar is basically a drug with immediate gratification with only longer-term side effects to the health. Unless there are laws, companies that put the most of it in their products will 1) make more money because it's cheap and 2) sell more product. I don't know what happened in Canada, but I would guess either those interested in profiting even at the expense of public health either out-competed more ethical competitors or were able to weaken public health laws. Who knows, maybe the US public was the first target, and they went to the north only after our pancreases/adipose tissues were completely saturated...
No, its not. Sucrose is a molecule. Fructose is a different molecule. Glucose is another different molecule.
> Like everyone else has noted, 1 sucrose molecule = 1 glucose + 1 sucrose.
You mean 1 sucrose molecule is broken down at the first stage of its metabolism into 1 glucose and 1 fructose, rather than sucrose being an infinitely recursive combination of 1 glucose + 1 sucrose.
> The proportion of glucose to fructos is just slightly different in HFCS vs table sugar (55/42 or 42/53, versus 50/50).
Yes, the proportion of fructose to glucose in HFCS is higher than than the fixed 1:1 ratio that sucrose is broken down into (the exact amount varies, because HFCS isn't a fixed ratio). Since fructose and glucose have different effects (one notable difference is that there is at least some indication that fructose doesn't trigger the body's mechanisms for satiety while glucose does), this can be significant.
Outside of that, your point is totally valid. The location in the body where the enzymes that break the glycosidic linkage means that the absorbtion curve is different. But I was not addressing that point. Just that the body doesn't break them down differently, after they sucrose molecule is split in the small intestines.
The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not which sugar is being used.
You can't look at the percentage difference of fructose and conclude that HFCS is not much different than regular sugar.
The reason HFCS is so terrible is because it is chemically different. As opposed to table sugar, where the sucrose, glucose and fructose are chemically bound, in HFCS the gluctose and fructose are unbound. What this means is that HFCS is digested much more quickly, often before the body can signal the brain that it is full.
They found the actual ratio varied from 47-65%, with the mean amount being 59%, and the amount in several major brands was 65%.
The fructose ratio in HFCS is not regulated or reported, so you could be drinking anything. With a mean of 59% a 9% difference to table sugar is a big difference, and many popular brands have a 15% difference.
According to the study, the difference between HFCS and sugar is not a myth.
The other advantage that sugar has over HFCS has nothing to do with the chemical composition. It's more expensive.
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Honestly, the amount of sugar/HFCS in various products in the US is absolutely insane. Hell, I pay a premium to buy whole natural peanut butter compared to Jif or the other crap which all contain sugar.
These days I spend more time looking at labels trying to find out what crap is in my food that shouldn't be there, chemicals, sugars, all kinds of salts, and preservatives. Ugh.
[Seriously, the stuff is like candy paste. Although I grew up eating American mass-market peanut butter, I can't stomach the Japanese stuff; even in a sandwich with something sweet like jam/jelly, it just tastes wrong...]
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...
When I drink a soda made with cane sugar, I am satisfied: I've had a nice little sugar rush, I'm happy, now I want to get on with whatever else I want to do.
When I drink a soda made with HFCS, I am teased: my body has been reminded how tasty something made with cane sugar is, and I'd really like to have something. Oh hey here's that half-drunk 2-litre of Coke, guess I'll have some more of that. Repeat.
Now that I've realized this difference, I buy and drink a hell of a less soda. And am much more happier when I drink what I do.
(This is of course in the middle of various other changes - it's after switching to diet soda for a while, and completely kicking the habit for a few years.)
In a sense, this quote isn't wrong. That's exactly what the sugar producing countries would do. The U.S. almost certainly does not have a competitive advantage in sugar production, and if the industry were deregulated domestic sugar production would end, and we'd become sugar importers. And that would be okay, because sugar isn't the strategically important commodity it once was.
But the same reasoning applies to steel and arms manufacturing too. The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas.
I think I know the rationale behind this statement, but I'm always curious as to why we hold on to these beliefs. If we let industries move around based on true competitiveness, stripped of subsidies and other anticompetitive practices, we might find that to be a force for good.
That said, I've come to believe that this is most likely a minority view. Everyone believes in free markets until it starts affecting their bottom line.
Now a year later, China decides it doesn't want to export to us anymore and bans exports of Steel to the US, now we are screwed for at least 6 months, since we don't have the ability to create the product anymore.
The difference with sugar is we do have an alternative available (corn syrup) so the loss wouldn't be as big.
1. Maintain a 6 months (or whatever time is necessary to restart production) stockpile
2. Have a highly credible policy that, if any foreign country actively opposes free trade of anything important, an ICBM loaded with a nuclear warhead is launched on their main government building or biggest city
3. Change things so that there is no advantage to producing abroad, if possible (e.g. allow unlimited immigration, remove taxation, remove minimum wages, remove regulations, etc.)
So stockpile it. Just buy 6-month's supply of cheap foreign steel and store it in a warehouse somewhere. Now if things turn south we just draw down the "strategic steel reserve" for a while - we have 6 months to either reclaim our prior ability or find another trading partner willing to sell to us.
Thought experiment: if the key to saving our civilization was on the moon, how long would it take us to redevelop the technology and infrastructure to get back there?
So let's flesh that out a little. Suppose steel costs $2/unit from a US firm, but costs $1/unit on the world market. We can go to companies in various other countries and pay some nominal fee (say, $50k/year) to buy an OPTION to buy their future steel output, not at the current price, but at twice the world price. So in the best case scenario there's no war, the steel company gets paid a nominal fee for an annual option that never gets exercised, and the US military saves far more by buying low cost steel through the years than the cost of the options. But if there ever is a war, we execute the option and get to buy (on 6 month's notice) that factory's full capacity at a 100% markup, crowding out whoever else they would otherwise have sold that steel to at a much lower price. So in wartime we pay foreign companies exactly what we would have had to pay a US firm - twice the world market rate - without first having to wait to build any US factories!
The foreign firm just has to allow for this in their contracts - that they reserve the right to cut off any buyer (paying a suitable penalty fee) with 6 month's notice. Now our stored 6-month supply is exactly enough to tide us over until options can reasonably be exercised (and penalty fees paid) that provide us with substitute sources.
We sign those sort of contracts with firms in a variety of countries in a variety of geographic locations. Unless our primary low-cost supplier gets mad at us and ALL those "safety" countries also get mad at us at the same time, we have an adequate safety margin.
All our steel - heck, all our ships - gets made for HALF the current cost until such time as there actually IS a war with our main supplier, whereupon it all gets made for exactly the price it would have cost to make domestically, had we kept that industry around.
In the middle of a war with China or Taiwan, a foreign company in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, or Canada is unlikely to consider us "the enemy", so they'll have no trouble selling us all the steel they can make at the inflated prices we're willing to pay. The contract and the higher-than-normal price it specifies, should suffice to compensate them for inconveniencing their normal customers, foreign or domestic.
(Are you expecting China to declare war on us and bomb every country in the world that we do business with? That seems like a pretty expensive and unlikely proposition. It's also worth noting that international trade all by itself tends to improve communications and reduce the potential for hostilities.)
You mean they might do what Australia did to Japan in 1938, and the US copied in 1940? If it comes to that, we'll all have bigger problems.
Whenever we "protect" one industry, that has negative downstream effects on all our other industries that depend on it.
In the case of steel, the fact that we protected steel manufacturers made our own auto manufacturers much less internationally competitive than they would otherwise have been, because US automakers were paying twice as much for their steel as companies in Japan and Taiwan were paying for theirs. Similarly, the US nearly killed Apple Computer at one point when it tried to "protect" the domestic semiconductor industry, making locally-assembled macs artificially more expensive than foreign-assembled clones due to the artificially-inflated price of imported DRAM chips.
The best way to "retain a meaningful industrial base" is let our companies compete on the world market.
We can get away with this inside a country, because governments monopolize the use of force, and so you can talk about "free" markets in terms of interactions between people in terms of market transactions, without factoring into the equation the possibility of use of force.
But as between countries, that fiction fails. Countries are in the state of nature. In that state, force is as valid an interaction as trade. Any discussion of the interactions between countries, therefore, must consider how force affects any trade dynamic between the countries.
So why do we keep a domestic steel and arms industry, even though it might be more efficient in terms of global GDP to let some other country manufacture those things? Because it's a huge disadvantage in terms of waging war to have your arms manufacturing done by some other country. We would have a hard time bombing China if our bomber aircraft were manufactured there...
You say that like it would a bad thing if we "had a hard time" bombing specific other countries. :-)
I know a supranational fanatical religious terrorist organisation that happens to agree with you.
So perhaps in light of this it might be a good idea being practical to get used to that fact and stop acting like endless bullying war is a realistic long term foreign policy?
On top of that, it's not actual 'bombing' that you use most of the time to do that, but the 'ability to bomb'. Nobody actually has to get blown up.
No, the idea that a "free market" would lead to a perfect society with perfectly efficient allocation of resources depends on that fiction. It's still quite possible to prefer a free market while still acknowledging the inevitability of market failures. Remember, governments inefficiently allocate resources too, for many of the same reasons as do markets.
Why, exactly, wouldn't that be okay? We'd only lose "all" domestic production if foreign production were quite a lot cheaper, in which case the benefit from switching is huge and ongoing. If you're worried about wartime security, here are three ways to mitigate that concern:
(1) Stockpile. Order enough (cheaper, now that it's imported) steel in advance that we'd be able to meet likely short-term needs.
(2) Diversify. Keep an eye on the foreign supply and make sure that we're at least perserving the option to buy from more than one country so if one trading partner gets angry we can just switch to buying from another.
(3) Be polite. Stop invading and/or bossing around every other country on the planet, so our trading partners aren't likely to have good reason to want to embargo trade with us.
The fact that more international trade would mean we might have to actually care what other countries think is a pretty huge argument in favor of it.
Here's a similar article with an interesting graph: http://mjperry.blogspot.ca/2011/01/big-sugar-cartel-cost-con...
The subsidies are such that a cattle farmer can actually make a profit buy growing corn, selling it (with subsidies), then buying corn back to feed their own livestock.
I fail to see how this is enlightening, of course growing corn creates a profit. If you are excluding the base profit of the corn, why wouldn't a subsidized market create additional profit?
You have to consider the taste, it tastes nicer because fructose has only 5 carbon in it's ring instead of 6 which leads to more pleasurable experience as it makes it fit better into the sweetness sensing in the mouth[1]
With Corn Syrup you get both glucose and fructose together whereas with sugar you just get sucrose. Another reason would be that more corn is grown in the US than sugar cane which makes it more efficient to produce corn syrup instead.
In practice, nobody is bothered by very slightly different taste. Coca Cola uses different sweeteners (including artificial ones) in different parts of world and mostly nobody notices.
More sweetness doesn't always taste well.
That's largely acquired.
I grew up without HFCS and I think old-timey sugar tastes better.
An interesting point in the article: "Coke suppressed demand for cane sugar formula because it would cost more to produce and consumers would not pay the extra cost."
Why are people discussing what the article specifically says it is not about?
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
And the whole category of Cokelore:
Both are victims of price fixing through government subsidies. It doesn't matter if you don't contribute to the purchase of the product, as your tax dollars already fund its creation.
I guess we should also toss soil erosion into the mix. Productive topsoil is a finite resource, and modern agriculture -- while it has improved somewhat, recently -- is expensive in this regard.
OTOH the more things have HFCS the fewer sugary products I eat, which is good for my health. Wouldn't work if everybody did that, of course.
I can be completely fine, eat something sweetened with Stevia and about an hour or two later my muscles will start aching. It is worst in my shoulders :-(.
This is just my experience, maybe I'm weird.
"sugar is an indispensable part of everyday life."
"The US sugar industry is almost as important to our economic vitality as is a steady supply of affordable energy. "
They could at least come up with some reasons that don't insult our intelligence.
Saw dust and wood chips are not food (unless you're a mushroom).