HFCS

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If You're Fat, THIS May Be to Blame

 

Quick! Go get your favorite packaged food. Look at the label. Does it have

an ingredient called high fructose corn syrup? If so, beware. It could be

making you fat--and you don't even know it.

 

Food manufacturers love to use high fructose corn syrup because it's cheap

and sweet. In October 2003, researchers at the University of Michigan

concluded that fructose in high levels elevates dangerous triglycerides by

as much as 32 percent and makes the body's fat burning and storage system

sluggish, which causes weight gain.

 

Now the U.S. Department of Agriculture has found more evidence of a link

between a rapid rise in obesity and a corn product used to sweeten soft

drinks and food since the 1970s, reports The Associated Press.

Specifically, the data showed an increase in the use of high fructose corn

sweeteners in the late 1970s and 1980s that was " coincidental with the

epidemic of obesity, " said one of the researchers, Dr. George A. Bray, a

longtime obesity scientist with Louisiana State University System's

Pennington Biomedical Research Center. The research was published in the

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

 

" Body weights rose slowly for most of the 20th century until the late

1980s, " Bray told AP. " At that time, many countries showed a sudden

increase in the rate at which obesity has been galloping forward. "

 

High fructose corn syrup is not a natural product. Called HFCS for short,

it is processed from hydrolyzed corn starch and contains:

 

* 14 percent fructose

* 43 percent dextrose

* 31 percent disaccharides

* 12 percent other products

 

Over the past 15 years, our consumption of HCFS has increased a

belt-busting 250 percent. By some estimates, we get as much as 9 percent

of our daily calories from fructose.

 

What foods are likely to contain high fructose corn syrup? Soft drinks,

juice, candy, baked goods, cookies, syrup, yogurt, soup, ketchup,

breakfast cereal, and pasta sauces.

 

Still, Bray insists there is not enough evidence to say there is a direct

link between high fructose corn syrup and obesity. Spokesmen with the food

and beverage industry agree. " It's not about the high fructose corn syrup

being a part of foods, it's about how many calories we're eating against

how many calories we're burning, " Alison Kretser, a registered dietitian

and director of scientific and nutrition policy for the Grocery

Manufacturers of America, insisted to AP. She may be right. Even the USDA

report lays the blame on people for eating too much and not exercising

enough.

" Dear God, please make my enemies ridiculous. "

--Voltaire