Quick Links: Sugar Woes and KFC Craziness

Wow, the HFCS myths page is pretty interesting. Some of what they say is true...HFCS does indeed have a similar composition to naturally occuring sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, etc.), but NOT to table sugar. Cane sugar, which is what USED to be used in the beverage industry about 25 years ago and prior, is 100% sucrose. Sucrose breaks down to fructose and glucose once you eat it, but HFCS is ALREADY broken down into fructose and glucose. I honestly think most of the problems with HFCS arise from its use in the soda/beverage industry because it makes people crave the beverage (because it makes your blood sugar spike faster than sucrose-sweetened soda would) and consume more liquid calories than would normally be consumed.

Regular soda is still sweetened with sugar here and we have just as much of an obesity issue as you guys do in the US. Most cookies etc. also use sugar, and not HFCS. In fact, some of the generic soda brands have made their regular soda sweetened with half sugar, half saccharine to cut costs and people are still getting fatter, although they are essentially drinking C2 instead of regular soda, without knowing it.

Jan makes an interesting point. As in the UK, here in Australia, most processed foods are made with sugar, rather than HFCS, and we have the dubious distinction of being the second-fattest nation in the world (after the USA).

My objection to HFCS is that it is in *everything* and I am sick of 90% of off-the-shelf products having an obnoxious sweet twinge. I'd have the same objection of it was basic cane sugar, but for whatever reason, it's impossible to buy anything processed or pre-made (unless you buy more expensive stuff at health food stores) that doesn't have it.

In particular, I am annoyed at the amount of sweetener - HFCS or otherwise - used in whole wheat bread. I have one use of bread - as toast, to sop up egg yolk, and the last thing I want is that sweet edge in my bread. What off-the-shelf breads don't use HFCS tend to use molasses.

The best way to avoid HFCS is to eat whole foods. It is almost unavoidable otherwise. Low-fat or fat-free salad dressings always seem to have it (and almost all fat-free dressings are cloyingly, disgustingly sweet; I don't use them as a result).

I have to wonder if the reason there are so many people with a sweet tooth is because just about every processed food is (often inappropriately) sweet - including foods that are not ordinarily considered dessert foods. The health consequences of this are obvious.

And so it seems to me that the problem is not the HFCS in dessert foods as much as its presence in other foods, including so-called "health foods" (or "low calorie" or "low fat" foods) which just reinforces and perpetuates sugar cravings.

My concern about this is not some ideological objection to sweet foods, but loyalty to my own tribe or class of people who do not really crave sweet foods, don't eat many of them even when eating ad lib, and prefer more savory alternatives, especially in the health food category. As I eat a lot of salads, I am particularly disgusted by the lack of low fat dressings that aren't disgustingly sweet. If I didn't care about calories or cholesterol, I'd use nothing but blue cheese.

Whatever anyone feels about fats in relation to diet, my purpose in avoiding them is mainly out of calorie density.

Quite obviously, the addition of lots of corn syrup to "light" dressings in place of fat may reduce some of the calories, but god only knows the ramifications in terms of insulin response, and whether or not that effect negates any calorie savings in the long run.

Perhaps the only real solution is to avoid processed food entirely. I have no kind of objection to the concept of heavily processed food in terms of its industrial origin; my objection is that processed foods more and more seem to be of miserable quality, and not only from a health and nutrition perspective, but from a taste one as well. Compare store-bought macaroni and cheese to homemade, for example.

If HFCS only showed up in foods like Oreos, I doubt it would be the annoyance it is. But it's everywhere, not only in places I don't want it from a health perspective, but in places I don't want it from a taste one, either.

I'm amazed by the HFCS in bread! I decided several months ago to stop eating any products with HFCS, so I just buy Ezekiel Bread. It's not sweet and it doesn't have that disgusting store bought bread smell. I make bread for my family fairly frequently also.

I think HFCS will be like Trans Fats. We knew about the dangers of Trans Fats 20 years ago. I remember telling my father-in-law about the chemical structure and he said it wasn't true, that the chemical structure is the same as normal fat, only with a hydrogen added. I was trying to tell him that the trans is different than the cis....hopeless!

ANYWAY, when people with names such as Institute of Food Technologies starts desperately trying to tell me to eat what they endorse I have to wonder what is really going on. It's not like they are arguing that an orange is healthy. They just want to sell that junk because it is cheap.

No one wants to eat cheap junk, so why are they risking so much to use it? I don't get why they think it's worth fighting for. It's like they are saying "Here, eat this, it's really cheap for us to make"! NO THANKS.

I think people *do* want to eat garbage because they've developed a sort of habit with it.

The #1 reason I hear for people who refuse to try to change their diets - whether they've had a heart attack, are developing diabetes, or are overweight, is "but diet food doesn't TASTE good."

Which is infantile, if you think about it (tastes are malleable over time, and second, food is fundamentally about keeping you alive, with taste as a secondary, and third, I think people are just closed minded about new things to some degree.)

I think one thing that anyone who has really made an attempt to pay attention to their diet realizes is that yes, while dieting - whether it's low sodium, low fat, low carb, or whatever - always entails some kind of sacrifice or deprivation, almost everyone is surprised to learn about healthy foods that they *do* like, that they weren't aware of - to the point where artificial analogues begin to taste horrible.

One thing ketogenic dieters regularly indicate is how sickening non-diet soda becomes due to increased taste sensitivity to sugar. Some can't even handle sweeter diet sodas like Diet Dr. Pepper after awhile.

Likewise, I cannot imagine a diet without lots of broccoli and fresh garlic - two things I didn't emphasize or have any particular attachment to until I started gaining weight and looking for alternatives.

I haven't looked too closely at it but a lot of people who buy organic produce swear it tastes better.

Such may be the case with bread. I was watching a comedy routine where the comic was sort of riffing on the silliness of people at restaurants getting excited about bread. The bit would have been funny except for the fact that the reason people get all worked up over bread in restaurants is it tends to be of significantly higher quality than the cruddy mass produced bread (like the execrable Wonder Bread) most people are used to eating.

If suddenly HFCS was abolished from existence, if peoples tastes wouldn't evolve to the point where, if you introduced it years down the road, the majority of people would find *it* disgusting.

Jan and RedPanda are right that a lot of these nonsense food myths would go away if people in the U.S. would just look abroad. I live in Japan where people are much thinner than in the U.S., but we eat most of our calories in the form of processed carbs: white rice. All the meat (mostly pork) is really fatty, I mean 50% fat -- it takes time for an American to learn to eat it without gagging. Supposedly mercury-laden fish, guts and all, is scarfed down in quantities unimaginable in the U.S. Isoflavone-filled soy products of all kinds are eaten in huge amounts.

People in the U.S. are fat and diabetes prone because they eat too much food, not because of what the food is. End of story.

Right on Mark. Amount of food + amount of processed food, as opposed to food cooked from scratch, even if eaten in a restaurant. "Fast food" in more traditional cultures is not frozen stuff fried in a franchise, it is someone who'll make a large vat of food from scratch and sell it throughout the day. Those are the 2 basic differences.

My mother's generation still ate food cooked from scratch. Nothing "healthy": french bread and butter for breakfast, rice and beans cooked with plenty of fat, the beans often cooked in lard, with bacon, etc., lettuce and tomato, a steak or chicken cooked in butter for lunch, or even battered and shallow fried, then a slice of homemade or bakery-bought cake for a snack, with so much butter it will sop up the plate it is eaten on, and for dinner, soup also with plenty of fat, bread, butter, and cheese. They did not however eat McD's or Oreos. And right now we can clearly see a difference on the streets. You'll see plenty of people in their 50s and 60s who are thin, grandmas with their families who are surrounded by their fat 15-year-old grandkids.