High Fructose Corn Syrup

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may be more dangerous because it sounds more natural—and therefore healthier—than plain old white sugar. Fructose and HFCS have been aggressively promoted as “natural sugars.” After all, we've been taught since childhood that fructose is fruit sugar. Fructose is not from fruit. It's a commercial, refined sugar. High Fructose Corn Syrup starts out as cornstarch. Companies use enzymes or acids to break down the starch into its glucose subunits. Then other enzymes convert different proportions of the glucose to fructose. The resulting syrups contain as much as 90 percent fructose, but most HFCS is 42 percent or 55 percent fructose.

Most fructose sneaks into the diet in the forms of sucrose and HFCS. Sucrose breaks down during digestion into equal parts of glucose and fructose. Fructose and HFCS, as large-scale commercial sweeteners, didn't exist 20 years ago. Now, they're almost as common as sucrose--plain old white sugar. Fructose, a staple in the diet of many Americans, is continually being pegged by scientific research as a significant player in the development and spread of cancer. Furthermore, a growing number of studies are finding fructose, and the processed foods in which it is contained, to be as addictive as cocaine. With highly-popular fructose tied to obesity and cancer growth, is it any wonder that the health of American citizens is in decline?

One new study, the researchers found that excess fructose consumption can actually damage the body in a number of ways beyond the development of cancer, including:

DNA damage
Inflammation
Altered cellular metabolism
Increased production of free radicals

Research published in the journal Cancer Research reached similar conclusions, finding that the way in which sugar is metabolized stimulates cancer growth. Even more concerning is the fact that the scientists performed the study using cells from one of the deadliest forms of cancer – pancreatic cancer. The researchers reported: Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different … These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation.

As if the carcinogenic nature of fructose wasn’t threatening enough, 50 percent of high-fructose corn syrup has actually been found to contain toxic mercury.

The negative effects of excess fructose – particularly high-fructose corn syrup – are clear, so why would anyone willingly choose to consume heavy amounts of fructose on a daily basis? Well, besides the fact that many individuals are unaware of the adverse health consequences, people are routinely consuming significant amounts of fructose due to it being highly addictive.

Consumers are addicted to carcinogenic high-fructose corn syrup. In fact, a large body of research is threatening the structural integrity of the $1 trillion food and beverage industry by revealing just how addictive fructose can be. Food addiction is becoming quite a popular topic in the scientific community, and the results may lead to big changes. This year alone, 28 studies and papers were published on the subject of food addiction, according to a National Library of Medicine database. One such study found that fructose and sucralose are even in the same league as cocaine.

‘The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,’ said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. ‘We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.’

Manufacturers of processed foods which contain high amounts of high-fructose corn syrup, fructose, or sucralose are not only endangering the health of consumers, but are also contributing to massive addiction to these health-destroying ingredients. It is very possible that as more research comes out on the manner, a full-fledged consumer backlash will spawn as a result, similar to the uproar seen against tobacco companies after information surfaced linking cigarettes to adverse health reactions.

In 2009, a study found that almost half of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury—a carcinogenic chemical element that is toxic in all its forms to the human body. Even more troubling, nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products that listed HFCS as the first or second ingredient were found to contain mercury as a whole. It is clear that mercury is highly present in the HFCS-laced food supply, so why is it still on our shelves?

HFCS is routinely added to processed foods and beverages. The advantage of HFCS, from the standpoint of food manufacturing, is that it's much sweeter than sucrose, it's easier to handle during processing, it has a longer shelf life—and it's cheaper than sucrose. HFCS may be better than sucrose for manufacturing, but it's not any better for health.

Our per-capita intake of refined sugar is almost 150 pounds a year. HFCS accounts for 51.7 pounds of that, and sucrose for 64.5 pounds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That translates to about 60 pounds of fructose per person.

There's good reason to believe that, from an evolutionary standpoint, our bodies can't handle such large quantities of sugar, particularly fructose.

Although pure fructose has been available in small quantities for decades, its use as common sweetener dates only from the early 1970s. That's when the Finnish Sugar Co. developed a method to efficiently synthesize it from cane and beet sugar. Now, six American companies make fructose from corn.

On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of high-fructose corn syrup, but teens and other high consumers can take in 80-percent more HFCS than average. Recent evidence suggests that a large amount of fructose in your diet might alter your metabolism in a way that increases your risk for diabetes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relates that the incidence of Type-2 diabetes has risen by 33 percent in the past decade and three out of every 50 American adults currently have this diet-related condition. Diabetes was a very rare illness in the United States in 1880, with only 2.8 persons out of every 100,000 having diabetes. Now at least 10-percent of the populace has diabetes.

Fructose has been touted for years as a safe sugar for diabetics because it doesn't trigger a rapid rise in blood sugar. That's true, but the cardiovascular consequences may outweigh the benefits for diabetics, who already face a higher than average risk of developing heart disease. It raises blood levels of cholesterol and another type of fat, triglyceride. It makes blood cells more prone to clotting, and it may also accelerate the aging process.

A trail of medical studies dating back a quarter of a century doesn't paint a terribly sweet picture for fructose.

"People should avoid it," urged John Yudkin, M.D., Ph.D., professor emeritus at Queen Elizabeth College, London, and an expert in the health effects of sugar.

As our consumption of high fructose corn syrup has risen 250 percent in the past 15 years, our rate of diabetes has increased approximately 45 percent in about the same time period. Our nation's sharp rise in diabetes is a result of increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and the resulting depletion of chromium in the body. Chromium is important in helping glucose pass from the bloodstream into the cells. Chromium is necessary for insulin receptors to wake-up. Consuming fructose in this form causes chromium levels to drop, in turn raising LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, and impairing immune system function. Then, people try to raise their chromium levels by supplementing with chromium picolinate. Chromium picolinate is, at best, only about 2-percent assimilable. Picolinic acid, used to make chromium picolinate, is a genetic poison. GTF chromium is the supplement of choice, as it is around 20 - 25-percent assimilable.

When early Native Americans changed their diet to one based mostly on corn, researchers noted that they had increased rates of:

Anemia

Dental cavities

Osteoarthritis

Bone infections and other bone problems

And that was from eating relatively unprocessed, organic, non-GMO corn. Nowadays corn is not only heavily processed into ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and corn oil, but it’s rarely organic, and most importantly nearly always GMO. HFCS is almost always made from genetically modified corn, which is fraught with its own well documented side-effects and health concerns, such as increasing your risk of developing a food allergy to corn.

According to two new U.S. studies, almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient. The contamination occurs when mercury cells are used to produce caustic soda. The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common.

Researchers have observed that the body doesn't process high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the same way glucose (sugar) is processed; with the result that fructose is more likely to be converted into fat. The increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) far exceeds the changes in intake of any other food or food group.

There are over 35 years of hard empirical evidence that refined man-made fructose like HFCS metabolizes to triglycerides and adipose tissue, not blood glucose. The downside of this is that fructose does not stimulate your insulin secretion, nor enhance leptin production. (Leptin is a hormone involved in appetite regulation.)

Because insulin and leptin act as key signals in regulating how much food you eat, as well as your body weight, this suggests that dietary fructose contributes to increased food intake and weight gain.

In animal studies, the University of California, Davis (UCD) team found that fructose consumption contributes to insulin resistance, an impaired tolerance to glucose, high blood pressure, and elevated levels of triglycerides. The researchers report that a high intake of fructose may increase body weight and encourage insulin resistance, both of which are risk factors for type-2 diabetes.

A series of chemical reactions changes fructose into glucose. When you have a lot of fructose in your diet, the reaction that changes fructose depletes your ATP. This puts the body in a stressed state. This stressed state triggers resistance to insulin, especially in liver and fat cells. Insulin resistance is responsible for causing type-2 diabetes. In addition to insulin resistance, depleted ATP has been blamed for other problems. High triglycerides, fatty liver, high blood pressure, artery disease, kidney troubles and high uric acid levels have all been tied to the stress of low ATP, and to high fructose.

Many of these problems are part of the "metabolic syndrome." This is a cluster of health issues including obesity, high-blood pressure, and high-cholesterol that tend to occur in the same person. It makes a person's risk for heart attack extremely high. Medical doctors don't completely understand what causes metabolic syndrome. Fructose has not been proven to be the source, but it is one likely suspect.

In medicine, the first alarms about the link between sugar consumption and heart disease were sounded by Yudkin in the late 1960s. At the time, he was chairman of the department of nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, London. Disturbed by inconsistencies in the evidence linking animal fats to heart disease, Yudkin began searching for another dietary factor.

An expert in carbohydrate metabolism, he initially focused on sucrose consumption. In laboratory and human tests, he found that sucrose increased blood levels of cholesterol, triglyceride, uric acid, insulin, and cortisol - all associated with an increased risk of heart disease. Sucrose also raised blood pressure and increased the fragility of blood platelet cells, making them more prone to clotting.

As dramatic as those findings were, the real surprise came when Yudkin substituted fructose for sucrose in his experiments. "The effects of eating sucrose in the quantities we eat are magnified with fructose. Fructose is the dangerous part," he said. In contrast, glucose did little more than cause cavities.

Other researchers have confirmed Yudkin's findings, but sucrose and fructose are still recognized as generally safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

Fructose and other sugars contribute to heart disease in yet another way. Dietary sugars increase what medical doctors call "spontaneous platelet aggregation," an unnatural tendency toward blood clotting. But according to a study published in the Aug. 1, 1990, Thrombosis Research, fructose promotes abnormal clotting much more than does any other common sugar does.

In a recent study, John Bantle, M.D., of the University of Minnesota sequentially placed 18 Type I (insulin-dependent) and Type II (noninsulin-dependent) diabetics on two diets. The only difference between the diets was that one contained carbohydrate as starch, which is digested as glucose, and the other contained carbohydrate as fructose.

When they consumed the fructose, the diabetics had fewer spikes in blood sugar levels. Three of the Type I diabetics were able to reduce their insulin intake, a positive change. However, according to Bantle's report in the Nov. 1992 Diabetes Care, the diabetics' total cholesterol rose an average 7 percent, and their "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol rose almost 11 percent. The fructose increased their risk of heart disease.

But fructose doesn't play havoc with only the hearts of diabetics. Bantle noted the same effects in a study of 14 healthy volunteers who sequentially ate a high-fructose diet and one almost devoid of the sugar. While on the fructose diet, the subjects' total cholesterol levels increased by 9 percent and the LDL fraction increased by 11 percent.

There is some data that if you consume a lot of fructose, you can get an increase in lipoproteins. A lot of this is mediated by consuming fructose with other carbohydrates. It is recommended to use a blend of carbohydrates--fructose may be the primary carbohydrate with glucose or more complex carbohydrates.

Add fructose to the typical American high-fat diet - as most people do - and the risk of heart disease increases even more. Sheldon Reiser, Ph.D., of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Md., studied 21 men eating two kinds of high-fat diets. The diets were the same except for the carbohydrate. One used simple starch, the other 20 percent fructose.

The cholesterol and triglyceride levels of all the men increased while they consumed the high-fructose/high-fat diet, but not while they ate a high-starch/high-fat diet. Ten of the men began the study with high blood levels of insulin - another risk factor for heart disease - and their cholesterol and triglyceride levels rose a whopping 30 to 50 percent.

There's one more significant side effect of fructose. The browning reaction occurs when certain carbohydrate molecules bind with proteins and cause ageing. It's also called glycation, glycosylation, and sometimes the Maillard reaction. It cross links - that is, ties up - proteins. This cross linking occurs during the cooking of food, affecting both the taste and the nutritional value of food.

The Maillard reaction also occurs in the human body, and it's suspected as a factor in diabetes and aging, according to William Dills, Ph.D., a chemist at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dills noted in the Nov. 1993 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that the relationship between the "Maillard reaction-related cross-link in proteins, cells, and tissues and the overall aging process appears indisputable."

It changes the structure of enzymes and other proteins, resulting in tissue and organ damage (and it's suspected in organ damage particularly in diabetics).' The browning reaction occurs with any sugar, but with fructose it happens seven times faster than it does with glucose.

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