This is food?

[pecunium]

The corn syrup industry has been stung by recent backlash against it's product.

There are a lot of interesting features to high-fructose corn syrup. The ability to set the sugar chains to various lengths makes it possible to adjust the viscosity without having to raise, or decrease, the actual amount of sugar.

But that very ability to modify its structure is at the heart of the debate about the effect it has on those who eat it, esp. those who eat it in great quantity. Maia's research/studies (it came up in some of her classes at CalPolySLO) convinced her to avoid it, and she convinced me (I do know that it has a different taste in Coke. Unless it's from Mexico, where sugar is still cheaper, I don't drink it). I don't know that I feel better since coming to avoid it, wherever possible, but it's not made great changes in my life.

Since the use of corn for syrup takes farmland out of productive use for food crops (the varieties are different, not just the end use. This is also one of the problems with growing corn for fuel, but that's a completely different topic) I have a small sense of comfort in doing a small bit to reduce demand for the stuff (though it would mean more if I sent a note to Coke, etc., telling them I wasn't buying their product because of the corn syrup).

Turns out there's a more pressing reason to avoid the stuff.

It makes tuna look good for you.

... with 45% of the HFCS samples containing mercury in this small study, it
would be prudent and perhaps essential for public health that additional research be
conducted by the FDA or some other public health agency to determine if products
containing HFCS also contain mercury. In 2004, several member states of the European
Union reported finding mercury concentrations in beverages, cereals and bakery ware,
and sweeteners [14] – all of which may contain HFCS.

... With the reported average daily consumption of 49.8 g HFCS per person, however, and our finding of mercury in the range of 0.00 to 0.570 μg mercury/g HFCS, we can estimate that the potential average daily total mercury exposure from HFCS could range from zero to 28.4 μg mercury.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Five of the six small-brand exotic root beers I picked up at the store in LA that specializes in obscure soft drinks were all sweetened with sugar, a couple specifying cane sugar, yea even Louisiana cane sugar in one case.

Consuming all those was more soft drinks than I normally have in a year. But HFCS is still hard to avoid in other foods.

[zeeth_kyrah]

I managed to find a variety of Quaker granola which has no HFCS or artifical flavors or colors. I just hope the local stores will keep it in stock.

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

50 grams a day?! Seriously, where the hell is it coming from? When I bake, 100g of sugar is what I put in a whole cake.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

That's quite a small cake, isn't it? The recipe I use has sugar=flour=eggs=butter, so 100g of sugar makes a cake that doesn't quite weigh a pound.

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

It's not a giant cake, but it feeds a D&D party with two slices left over for breakfast that day.

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

All depends on the basic dough. In a Gugelhupf (basic is yeast dough), I'd use less than 100 g sugar on 500 g flour. The sweetness is coming from the yeast.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Because of how it can be made to behave, HFCS is useful as a preservative. That's why lots of things which use sugar to sweeten, have it as the second ingredient.

It doesn't have to be sweet, so it can be used in all sorts of ways/places, one wouldn't expect to find it.

[ungemmed]

I've caught it on the ingredients list of canned tomatoes, for crying out loud.

[/delurk]

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's because tomatoes are in need of some sweetening when canned (esp. when the less than fully ripe tomatoes used for commercial canning are the fruits in question).

And HFCS is cheaper for the manufacturer (it' subsidized and it stores more easily).

[daedala.livejournal.com]

One sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke will do ya.

(I'm assuming that all the carbohydrates in Coke are HFCS. I think this is reasonable, since Diet Coke has 0 carbs. There's 25g/serving, and a serving is 8 oz.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yep, any non-sugar, non-"artificially" sweetened soda will do ya.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

I'm the sad owner of international cookbooks, and just like any online recipy these days they rely heavily on corn syrup and I never know wtf to replace it with (but there's lots of other strange US food stuffs so if I cannot guess or replace with sugar I usually give up).

[phonemonkey.livejournal.com]

I actually have some fairly old US cookbooks that require corn syrup (e.g. the awesome 60s Joy of Cooking with the clambake-for-100 instructions and the detailed diagrams of how to butcher a squirrel). Apparently it's great for making candy.

[ungemmed]

There's a big difference between normal corn syrup and HFCS, though. The former is still probably not very good for you, but possibly not significantly worse than normal sugar?

Sometime, though, I need to try subbing invert syrup (a cane sugar derivative) for corn syrup in candy recipes.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes, HFCSs are really variable. And I was silly to conflate them; because it's hard to get them, "over the counter".

If I understand it, invert will do different things. You might want to talk to xopher_vh as he is quite the candy maker.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

The concentration of mercury in the average HFCS from the worst manufacturer is about the same as the more mercury-ridden kinds of tuna, according to http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/sea-mehg.html

That was a really scary report, because it indicates how thoroughly the FDA has been emasculated: I would naively have expected that, if a company tells an FDA enforcement agent that the source of its ingredients is a proprietary matter, the FDA enforcement agent would inform the company that the source of its potentially mercury-ridden ingredients is a public health matter, to be divulged immediately if not sooner under pain of a fine equal to three times the total revenue from such products sold subsequently.

The relationship between Big Food and the public health authorities should be adversarial, and the public health authorities ought to name names in big print when they make discoveries like this, rather than a supine 'Company A' and 'Company B'. It may be that there is now an FDA ruling that mercury-process sodium hydroxide must not be used in food processing, which seems an obvious-right outcome here, but I don't know how I'd find out if such a ruling had been made.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

And that peanut processor knew its products had salmonella, and sent them out anyway.

But wait! The market will police itself! (yeah, RIGHT.)

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

Thank you for linking to this, and specifically to an article with the actual quantities found listed in it. I'm disgusted. At least fish has Omega-3 fats and other such useful things, corn syrup is simply not nutritionally valuable at all.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It has the same food value as any other carbohydrate. It's functionally equivalent to sugar. The question is "does corn syrups different molecular structure affect the way the body treats it?"

The answer to that is, we don't know. Given the extra hassles in extracting it, there isn't really any good reason to have it so widely available; except that it's (for reasons having nothing to do with inherent costs) really conventient.

For those functions in which it's the only thing (candies, some sorts of baking) it's the only thing which works. But for the reast, sugar would be as effective. In some cases sugar is (to my mind, e.g. Coke) better tasting, and more satisfying.

Fannish Answer Syndrome

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Regular corn syrup (the stuff for candies and baking) is 100% glucose. I'm pretty sure any glucose syrup works as a substitute, so someone who's allergic to corn can use glucose from another source.

HFCS is mostly fructose, which is treated different from glucose within the body. HFCS has several strengths, 42% - 90% fructose, instead of a 50/50 ratio in sucrose or 100/0 in regular corn syrup.

Glucose can be metabolized anywhere in the body. If we don't have enough glucose, our bodies make more. Fructose, however, has to go through the liver first. Its first use is to replenish glycogen. Once you have enough glycogen, it is metabolized into triglycerides, i.e. fat.

The health effects of all this are debated. I avoid the stuff like the plague now.

(Disclaimer: I am not an expert. I knew this from other reading and double-checked on Wikipedia.)

Re: Fannish Answer Syndrome

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I seem to recall having read that at some point, but had forgotten the difference in end state when digested.

Re: Fannish Answer Syndrome

[daedala.livejournal.com]

NP. I am mildly obsessed with this.

I don't think that the end state is the only problem -- I recall hearing that distracting the liver with fructose metabolization when there is lots of other metabolizing to do might also be an issue. I have no cites, though. It seems to make sense, but I'm not sure how much reliance I would put on "making sense" as far as metabolism goes, I think that even the experts' scientific intuition has proven pretty suspect.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I have become a very avid reader of labels. And an avid home cook too- since that is the only way I can control the ingredients in my food. HFCS is in nearly everything, it seems- even bread. Its gotten to where I won't buy pre-made foods any more because they're so full of bad stuff. And I haven't had a soda forever. I need to see if I can find Mexican coke, since it has real sugar in it, and probably tastes the way Coke used to taste.

This mercury thing kind of makes me wonder if it might have some bearing on the explosion of autism and Aspergers. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that was the case. And it would track with the increase of the substance in our food, too.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I had the same thought about the mercury and the autism explosion.

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

"HFCS is in nearly everything"

...and makes life a living hell for people allergic to corn. (Including one of my friends.)

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

That would be more likely if autism were mercury poisoning or if there had been a dramatic increase in incidence rather than diagnosis.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The problem (as explained in the paper) is the absolute inability to test for cause. Mercury is a nasty poison, esp. to developing brains/neural tissue. I've known people who got mercury poisoning. It did some brain scrambling.

Does low dose exposure in utero lead to autism spectra problems? No way to be sure, and no way to make an acceptable (in any sense of the word) study.

As to incidence/reporting... also not clear. One of the things I am amused by is the people who say people are, "healthier" now because some sorts of disease (various fevers) have "died out".

What's happened, course, is some of them are no longer present in regions where they were once rampant (e.g. all the various "repeating fevers", which were malaria. Which wasn't eradicated in Scandanavia until the 18th century), and others (Typhoid) are in abeyance because we are cleaner.

But, (absent some serious longitudinaly studies; involving forensic epidmeiology) we don't know if autism (or peanut allergies or, or, or) are reporting, or uptick.

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

At some point, I think, the question of parsimony needs to get raised.

Autism wasn't widely-studied or widely-reported, and was far less *known* as a condition, for much of the last century (to say nothing of previous ones). In the last five decades, communication and media have exploded on a scale previously inconceivable; at the same time, our understanding of matters psychological and neurological has developed quite a lot. People who've felt intensely alienated in their experiences (both autistic folks, and their parents) can now socialize and work with groups where that experience is the sole point of commonality for the people involved. As a result: more attention is being paid to the matter, it gets more airtime, and more speculation from outside parties. Autistic people themselves have formed online communities and even self-advocacy platforms that would have been inconceivable before ubiquitous internet access became a way of life for so many. This has led to discussion of the experience from an insider's perspective, leading to more self-diagnosis (and also more false positives).

Barring serious evidence and lacking any way to make such a study, doesn't it behoove us to deploy Ockham's razor here?

(Tangentially, aesmael linked me to this post, hence why a complete stranger is commenting on your journal. ^^)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Which is part of the problem. Absent that (impossible) longitudinal study, there is no way to know. Thimerisol is almost certainly not the cause.

That said, the rates of incidence are such that it seems likely there is some uptick in the rates of autism. Root cause is uknowable (there's also been an uptick in asthma, diabetes, various types of mental disorder, etc. Most of which aren't real increases in the incidence, but rather in reporting/awareness).

But Occam's razor is not the thing to use. Because that will cause us to dismiss the possibility of outside cause. If mercury is the culprit (in the form of ingestion during gestation) then it behooves us to reduce, where we can, the amount of mercury floating about to be ingested.

Which is, in any case, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

That said, the rates of incidence are such that it seems likely there is some uptick in the rates of autism. Root cause is uknowable (there's also been an uptick in asthma, diabetes, various types of mental disorder, etc. Most of which aren't real increases in the incidence, but rather in reporting/awareness).

It may seem likely, but absent that study, how can we know?

But Occam's razor is not the thing to use. Because that will cause us to dismiss the possibility of outside cause.

...we don't know if there's an actual effect, or what it correlates to, and it is difficult or impossible to derive it -- but we should presume it's there when less-convoluted explanations might suffice?

If mercury is the culprit (in the form of ingestion during gestation) then it behooves us to reduce, where we can, the amount of mercury floating about to be ingested.

It seems like there are plenty of other good reasons, which have been verified scientifically...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It seems like there are plenty of other good reasons, which have been verified scientifically...

Then we know, and so the study is unneeded.

Or maybe we don't.

All things being equal, if mercury is a known harm (it is) and we can prevent it (we can) then the worst that happens is things get no worse.

The best that happens is things we haven't tested for (e.g. say the tetragenic effects of thalidomide) are prevented.

More to the point mercury causes real problems, which is why we say eating fish high in the concentration food chain is bad. Having daily staples in which a weeks worth of high concentration equivalents is a daily problem, is straight-up a bad idea.

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

Then we know, and so the study is unneeded.

Hang on a minute, there.

We know that mercury has harmful effects. We *don't* know that mercury's harmful effects have a blessed thing to do with autism and AS.

Given that we can't do a study of relative autism rates over time and don't know the specific causes (I admit to preferring the "neurological variation" argument), tell me how Ockham's Razor isn't justified here. We don't know if there's been an increase, we do know there's been an increase in reporting and communication, and an increase in attention on the subject by professional psych-types and people who have (or suspect they have) the condition.

So the mercury explanation, in light of these and other flaws (such as the fact that AS and mercury poisoning produce very different results...), seems unnecessary to describe and understand the situation. If we had some basis for invoking that explanation, or direct evidence that pointed to it, that'd be one thing. We don't. It should go.

Whether or not mercury is dangerous is not at issue here.

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

I have become a very avid reader of labels. [...] I need to see if I can find Mexican coke, since it has real sugar in it, and probably tastes the way Coke used to taste.

I taste different kinds of sugar and sweeteners very well, which is a nuisance. I cannot tolerate artificial sweeteners (tastes burning/hot, not sweet -- like chilis with the chili taste taken out and only the hotness left), and HFCS has a stinging aftertaste. When in the US, I had to hunt for food with either no sugar or real sugar, and stayed away from most of the beverages I usually consider a good "pick-me-up" snack when travelling.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The only reason corn syrup is cheaper is because corn gets massive subsidies and sugar has very high tariffs. If we took down the tariffs for sugar, there'd be no economic reason to use corn syrup.

But I'm sure you knew that already...

[kodi]

My favorite part about the whole thing is that the official Corn Refiner's response is, "No, we stopped using mercury a few years ago."

[firepower.livejournal.com]

haha whoa

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Interesting tidbit, via Russ: apparently the demand for Mexican soft drinks (not just Mexico-bottled Coke, but national brands like Jarritos, all of which are sweetened with sugar) has gotten so high that it's outstripped the bottling capacity in Mexico! They're having to contract out some of the bottling to facilities here in the States. This has caused much bemusement and glee south of the border.