High-Fructose Corn Syrup: The 'Dark Lord' of Nutrition

Hank takes on high fructose corn syrup - the new "dark lord of nutrition" - to help explain the ambiguities around all the claims being made about it.

Sources:

[ZetteSue]

You should do a SciShow episode on HOW the body metabolizes sugar vs high fructose corn syrup. The chemical reactions involved, and how it is stored. I think that would be more conclusive to your argument.

[ckmishn]

High fructose corn syrup isn't "wonderfully cheap, " and it isn't JUST because of the subsidies that it's used. It's also because sugar producers demanded an import tariff that made sugar too expensive. Soft drink makers, among others, switched to corn syrup to save money and ended up making the corn farmers dependent on the import tariff on sugar as well. Of course not every manufacturer that used corn syrup as a raw material could switch, especially candy makers so their costs soared. Eventually some major ones ended up moving their factories to other countries to save money on sugar (labor is generally cheaper too but not, by itself, enough to make them leave). A big example of this is Brachs which left Illinois and took hundreds of jobs with it.

Whatever its health effects, the economics of high fructose corn syrup is a mess.

Also, technically I think there actually is a tiny amount of hfcs in that corn dog, though it probably rounds down to 0 grams.

[bencera]

That was a lot less informative than I expected.

[etmax]

Well this was the first Scishow video that disappointed me because it really didn't say anything.

[photondance]

Haters have, in fact, demonstrably shown a predisposition to exhibit hating behaviors.

[TeacherMom]

I grew up in the 80s & 90s, when Fat Free was the fad, too. My parents were constantly on a diet & I became afraid of fat & developed an eating disorder in my teens.

My grandmother focused on eating healthy natural foods & leading an active lifestyle. Her Dad was a milkman & used to pour cream on his cereal & was never overweight & always had beautiful skin. She said fat is a natural part of the human diet & our bodies need it. (Go, Grandma!) She’d say, “[Look at the old farmers, Stacie. They ate bacon for breakfast, poured cream on their cereal, lived off the land…and we’re never overweight. It’s not the fat that’s bad, Stacie, it’s lifestyle changes. People lead more secondary lifestyles. It’s what people are eating & how much they’re eating & then having jobs where they sit at a desk all day. People aren’t moving like they used to…]” She was right!

It wasn’t until recent years that I learned that a person can be overweight AND malnourished. Eating cheap heavily processed foods with little to no nutritive value messes with every system of the body & can cause all kinds of health problems, leaving a person to feel full but never satisfied.

We live in a world of abundance. I got tired of tracking calories & keeping up with the latest diet fads. I got a science degree, learned how my body works & buy basic minimally processed ingredients, grow what I can& teach my kids to make everything from scratch— right down to bread & pasta. Sure, we buy candy bars & chips sometimes but keep them out of the house for the most part. I get a little pudgy in the winter but burn it off growing food inthe summer.

I tell my kids, people evolved eating natural foods. If it doesn’t grow on a tree or in the dirt or you can’t catch it or kill it, you might want to reconsider eating it…or at least not eat it in abundance. Put the basic stuff in your body that you need to live & keep moving. You’ll feel like a million bucks, even when you start getting achey as you get older. It’s just sad because nutritious foods are expensive these days & people can’t afford to feed their families well. And people have lost touch with whatI remand to leads self sufficient lifestyle within just a few generations. I make my kids listen to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books on audible to help them realize that humans had hands inthe dirt until recent generations in the western world. Of course, they still want their screens more than anything. But hopefully one day when they’re older & wiser (God willing)they’ll look back & realize that Mom wasn’t such a but after all.

We are what we eat. There’s an old saying that never went out of style. 😆

And I don’t know how to make fat free cookies either. Ridiculous!

[ssiddiqui]

I was once told by a very reliable source, "Eat anything you want, as long as it's unhealthy." This source also happened to be my, sister who weighed 82 pounds at 5' 4".

[peterbateman]

You said that the two types of sugar are chemically similar because they have the same components...one with them bonded together and the other not. It seems like that should make a HUGE difference. I mean, you don't take a mix of hydrogen and oxygen gasses and say that it's basically water. Right? Or, if you really want to stick with sugars, lactose is just a disaccharide composed of galactose and glucose. Neither galactose nor glucose causes any problems in someone with a lactose intolerance. It seems like the statement that they are similar requires more proof than was given.

[distantrhythm]

Health problems: High-fructose corn syrup contains free-form monosaccharides of fructose and glucose, so it cannot be considered biologically equivalent to conventional sugar which is just sucrose, which has a glycosidic bond that links the fructose and glucose together, and slows its break down in the body.
Even if this metabolic difference were not present, every cell in your body uses glucose for energy, and it's metabolized in every organ of your body. About 20 percent of glucose is metabolized in your liver. Fructose, on the other hand, is entirely metabolized in your liver, because your liver is the only organ that has the transporter for it.
Since all fructose gets shuttled to your liver, it ends up taxing and damaging your liver in the same way alcohol and other toxins do. And just like alcohol, fructose is metabolized directly into fat – not cellular energy, like glucose. So, eating fructose in excess of the very small amount our body can handle is really like eating fat – it just gets stored in your fat cells, which leads to mitochondrial malfunction, obesity and obesity-related diseases.
And speaking of toxins, HFCS is loaded with them, due to the highly-chemical process of manufacturing it. It also increases your triglyceride levels and your LDL (bad) cholesterol. Fructose is relatively harmless in small quantities, but virtually all soda and processed foods are loaded with it so if you want to be healthy try eating real food instead.

[somaticmonk]

I wish he'd gone into the rat study more, because it is true, and a big deal. The rats become obese compared to eating sugar or rat chow. The theory is that it's because of how highly processed HFCS is compared to sugar: your body has to do a lot less work to digest it.

Either way, if anyone tells you the concerns about HFCS are baseless, they're probably working for the corn lobby.

[Meow_YT]

There was something in one of the science rags in the 90s that suggested that high-levels of Fructose in foods was linked to an increase in diabetes. Something about the way it is handled by the liver, requiring more work. It explicitly mentioned HFCS too.

[KevinTheVegan]

The problem isnt the sugar, its the lack of nutrients

[apricity]

Along these same lines, you could talk about the glycemic index and what a high or low glycemic index means for that particular food item (mentioning how our bodies process these foods).

[CurleyGirl]

Love your foody science videos! keep them coming I took a course in Food Science in college and I learned how companies make cookies fat free. The fats in cookies were replaced with carbohydrate gels and gums (such as carageen gum - which is made from seaweed) Gels have a semblance of the mouth feel of fat but the lower calorie content of 4kcals/g instead of 9 kcal/g, also making them conveniently lower in calories but much less tasty.

[Shadowarfare]

Could the increase in American obesity have to do with the simplicity of the HFCS on a molecular level, causing even more of an unstable metabolic impact on the body due to the lack of time needed to break the substance down before it entering the bloodstream? That's my best guess.

[YHLGguitargeek]

I'll tell you, you can taste the difference between Cocacola made with High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Cocacola made with Sugar. 

[jsweney]

You fail to address the issue of the human insulin response and how it is affected by a change in the ratio of glucose:fructose in the blood stream...

[Roflsponge]

Hey! Do a special on the "zero-calorie" sweeteners while you're at it! (Aspartame, Splenda, Sucralose, Stevia, etc...)

There seems to be SO MANY misconceptions and myths going on about these, and I'd actually like to know more about them because... I'm guilty of consuming them way too often. I just hate sugary soda so it's a good alternative usually.

[ghostlourde]

Fructose, sucrose, glucose, cellulose, lactose, galactose.

Sorry, just wanted to see how many sugars I could name.

[jonfischer]

The link for the Reference is not working, is that just me?