What is high-fructose corn syrup, and is it actually bad for you?

what even is high fructose corn syrup and why is it in everything these days and why are so many people freaked out about it well high fructose corn syrup starts off as regular corn syrup kind of like this then the corn refining industry uses enzymes derived from bacteria to convert much of the glucose here into fructose why because fructose tastes way sweeter than glucose does sweeteners of all kinds are expensive and if food manufacturers use the high fructose stuff they can make their products just as sweet for less money also more sweetness for fewer calories i suppose it's actually kind of shocking how not sweet regular corn syrup is i experienced this recently when i was doing a bunch of experimental brownie recipes i made a batch where i replaced the sugar with corn syrup by weight and i even accounted for the fact that the corn syrup is about 25 water i upped the quantity proportionally these came out flat and gummy perhaps because of the extra water and they were so under sweet as to be kind of disgusting it was like eating a packing material if you want to substantially replace sugar with corn syrup in your food you kind of have to make the corn syrup sweeter and why would you want to replace sugar with corn syrup in your food well again because it's cheaper or at least it can be cheaper depending on where you are you can only grow sugar cane in very wet hot climates brazil is perfect for it they're the biggest sugar cane producer on earth now here in the united states it's really only possible in the deep southeast florida louisiana texas up north you can grow sugar beet and indeed sugar beet accounts for about half of u.s sugar production and when i said sugar that time i meant specifically this sucrose sucrose is a disaccharide two monosaccharides bonded together one glucose and one fructose holding hands basically the sugar produced here in the united states is generally about half beets half cane and its price is artificially inflated via a complex government system of price controls and import tariffs and production quotas those familiar with the intricacies of the federal government's sugar program could be forgiven for wondering whether they had been led astray by their history books and it was actually the soviet union's ideology that prevailed in the cold war so writes the libertarian cato institute in their denunciation of u.s sugar policy these are policies with historical roots in the earliest years of the country when southern sugar barons enslaved human beings and used the fruits of their toil to buy politicians it is not a pretty history in contrast the price of corn maize here in the united states is kept artificially low i mean corn has always been cheap and easy to grow it is after all indigenous here right but since the depression in the 1930s the federal government has also paid billions and billions of dollars in subsidies directly to farmers of corn and other grains corn is just so cheap and abundant here which is why scientists for decades have worked to try to make things out of it beyond just grits and animal feed the white fluffy starch inside a kernel of corn is a combination of amylose and amylopectin which are both just huge branches of glucose thousands of glucose units all stuck together when the glucose is all branched out like that we cannot taste it or at least we cannot taste it as sweet we eat it and it goes into our system and it gets broken down into glucose and then absorbed into our body where it is used as calories energy fuel that's a good thing if you need it it's a bad thing if you don't corn refiners use a combination of acid and enzymes to break the starch down into smaller or simpler carbs that we can taste primarily dextrose which is a kind of glucose and that process has been around since the 19th century it wasn't until the 1960s when japanese and american industries working in collaboration figured out a new enzymatic process to convert some of the glucose into fructose now the american processed food industry had a product that was as sweet as sugar but far cheaper to make and because it's already in solution it's cheaper to work in a factory you can pump it around the plant through pipes this is why high fructose corn syrup is nearly ubiquitous in processed foods despite persistent and well-publicized health concerns are those concerns the overblown pseudoscience of hippie mom bloggers some of them maybe but there is some real science there too that we should talk about i do wonder if the stigma is why as near as i can tell it is impossible to buy high fructose corn syrup by itself at a grocery store this is why i had to order a 5 gallon bucket obviously intended for commercial operations the 55 does not mean this weighs 55 pounds though it does happen to weigh almost exactly 55 pounds very heavy rather the 55 here indicates that 55 of the dry weight in this bucket is fructose it tastes extremely sweet and silky smooth as 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helixsleep.com thank you helix now high fructose corn syrup and health the american corn refining industry has spent a huge amount of money to communicate to you and me that sugar is sugar is sugar and if you are becoming unhealthy by eating high fructose corn syrup that's because you're eating too much sugar period and you should cut back and you know what there's probably a lot of truth to that but because the industry has already delivered that message to you quite effectively i'm going to try to give you the best argument to the contrary there is a lot of research showing that fructose is processed differently by our body than other simple carbs and sure fructose is natural it literally means fruit sugar it's found in all kinds of fruits like this tomato tomato as a fruit good tomatoes have a lot of fructose in them that's why they're sweet but just because something is naturally occurring doesn't mean that it can't be bad for you and very rarely in the fruit world do you get concentrations of fructose this intense or ratios of fructose to glucose that are so out of balance science says glucose enhances the absorption of fructose in our guts so when we eat glucose and fructose in roughly equal proportions we generally are able to digest it just fine some popular fruits like apples naturally have way more fructose than glucose in them but most others have roughly equal glucose to fructose ratios as does table sugar there when we eat more fructose than glucose the result is called excess free fructose in our guts which you might have trouble digesting some people in particular seem to be fructose mal absorbers let me introduce you to somebody this is luanne to christopher about 20 years ago she found herself rushing her daughter to the hospital with blue lips awful asthma this little girl had really scary stuff you know she had all these symptoms we thought it might be food related we took her to an allergist the allergist said eliminate corn we did that we had no uh results when we eliminated anything with the word corn syrup high fructose corn syrup was when we had our breakthrough and it made no sense indeed what does sugar in your digestive system have to do with your lungs right and this happened just around the time when high fructose corn syrup production and consumption was peaking in the united states it was everywhere and widely regarded as nutritionally indistinguishable from sucrose but when luanda christopher's daughter stopped eating high fructose corn syrup her lungs got better now most parents would be perfectly satisfied and convinced by that purely anecdotal correlation not luanne so i returned to school got a masters in biochemistry molecular biology i have collaborated with a nutritional epidemiologist dr tucker at the university of massachusetts lowell and and with her i've conducted numerous studies i want to stress this is not work that is appearing in earthy crunchy conspiracy theory blogs this is appearing in peer-reviewed major scientific journals findings that have since been reproduced by other research teams this research shows that if you are a person who has trouble absorbing fructose excess free fructose hangs around in your gut where it is highly reactive with other stuff in there it then goes on to interact with your proteins it undergoes a reaction known as glycation you form these immunogens they're tiny uh they are you know can become absorbed are in your systemic circulation travel throughout all your tissues and uh your your your lungs have a high concentration of these receptors that are mediators of asthma and what do they do they promote airway mucus hyper secretion your your your your airways get filled with mucus hence asthma chronic bronchitis and potentially other allergy type symptoms other research has indicated now hold on some people might say people might say hey what about apple juice apple juice is a product that naturally has an elevated fructose to glucose ratio apple juice isn't giving kids asthma thing is it actually might be not in everybody obviously scientists are still working on this there may be a genetic component to fructose malabsorption it might have to do with the microbiome in our guts maybe things we're doing to our bodies antibiotics messing with the bacteria that help us to digest sugars nobody knows but kids do seem to be disproportionately affected kids of color here in the united states seem to be disproportionately affected for reasons that are no doubt multifactorial and this is an area of emerging research that we should all probably be paying attention to oh and don't be thinking that all these hip new alternatives are automatically going to solve your problems for you like agave syrup agave syrup has lots of excess free fructose now remember i am not a scientist i am just a nerd who likes to eat i have a lot of confidence in the ability of science to expose the truth over the long arc of history but in the meantime some very very moneyed interests have a lot at stake in us all believing that sugar is sugar is sugar i mean just read the wikipedia article on high fructose corn syrup you're going to find tons of citations to studies that find that sugar is sugar in the body i do not reject these studies most food science is industry funded and not all of that science is industry funded this is just the way it is and maybe by and large sugar is sugar is sugar but there is reason to believe that at least in some people consuming lots of fructose in excess of glucose could be a problem and food manufacturers do not have to tell us how much excess free fructose is in their food it is commonly believed that soft drink manufacturers use this kind of corn syrup 55 fructose but independent analysis from the university of southern california finds the fructose content of drinks is often much higher than that and even the total sugar content of the drinks is often higher than what's shown on the nutrition label so we don't even know what we're consuming what we can say for sure is that high fructose corn syrup like msg takes really really inexpensive garbage foods and it renders them freaking delicious i should probably be eating less of them you do you i just dropped my spoon in there did you get it

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,343,266

Keywords: HFCS

Id: DEKrfvgPGDY

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021