5 Reasons High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Kill You

Doubt and con­fu­sion are the cur­rency of decep­tion, and they sow the seeds of com­pla­cency. These are used skill­fully through mas­sive print and tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing cam­paigns by the Corn Refiners Association‘s attempt to dis­pel the “myth” that HFCS is harm­ful and assert through the opin­ion of “med­ical and nutri­tion experts” that it is no dif­fer­ent than cane sugar. It is a “nat­ural” prod­uct that is a healthy part of our diet when used in moderation.

Except for one prob­lem. When used in mod­er­a­tion it is a major cause of heart dis­ease, obe­sity, can­cer, demen­tia, liver fail­ure, tooth decay and more.

The Lengths the Corn Industry Will Go To

The goal of the corn indus­try is to call into ques­tion any claim of harm from con­sum­ing high fruc­tose corn syrup, and to con­fuse and deflect by call­ing their prod­uct nat­ural “corn sugar”. That’s like call­ing tobacco in cig­a­rettes nat­ural herbal med­i­cine. Watch the slick ad where a car­ing father walks hand in hand with his four-year-old daugh­ter through a big ques­tion mark carved in an idyl­lic cornfield.

In the ad, the father tells us:

“Like any par­ent I have ques­tions about the food my daugh­ter eats—like high fruc­tose corn syrup. So I started look­ing for answers from med­ical and nutri­tion experts, and what I dis­cov­ered whether it’s corn sugar or cane sugar your body can’t tell the dif­fer­ence. Sugar is sugar. Knowing that makes me feel bet­ter about what she eats and that’s one less thing to worry about.”

Physicians are also tar­geted directly. I received a 12-page color glossy mono­graph from the Corn Refiners Association review­ing the “sci­ence” that HFCS was safe and no dif­fer­ent than cane sugar. I assume the other 700,000 physi­cians in America received the same pro­pa­ganda at who knows what cost.

In addi­tion to this, I received a spe­cial “per­sonal” let­ter from the Corn Refiner’s Association out­lin­ing every men­tion of the prob­lems with HFCS in our diet—whether in print, blogs, books, radio or tele­vi­sion. They warned me of the errors of my ways and put me on “notice.” For what I am not sure. To think they are track­ing this (and me) that closely gives me an Orwellian chill.

New web­sites like www.sweetsurprise.com and www.cornsugar.com help “set us straight” about HFCS with quotes from pro­fes­sors of nutri­tion and med­i­cine and thought lead­ers from Harvard and other stel­lar institutions.

Why is the corn indus­try spend­ing mil­lions on mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns to con­vince con­sumers and health care pro­fes­sion­als of the safety of their prod­uct? Could it be that the food indus­try com­prises 17 per­cent of our economy?

But are these twisted sweet lies or a sweet sur­prise, as the Corn Refiners Association web­sites claim?

What the Science Says about HFCS

Let’s exam­ine the sci­ence and insert some com­mon sense into the con­ver­sa­tion. These facts may indeed come as a sweet sur­prise. The ads sug­gest get­ting your nutri­tion advice from your doc­tor (who, unfor­tu­nately, prob­a­bly knows less about nutri­tion than most grand­moth­ers). Having stud­ied this for over a decade, and hav­ing read, inter­viewed or per­son­ally talked with most of the “med­ical and nutri­tion experts” used to bol­ster the claim that “corn sugar” and cane sugar are essen­tially the same, quite a dif­fer­ent pic­ture emerges and the role of HFCS in pro­mot­ing obe­sity, dis­ease and death across the globe becomes clear.

Last week over lunch with Dr. Bruce Ames, one of the fore­most nutri­tional sci­en­tists in the world and Dr. Jeffrey Bland, a nutri­tional bio­chemist, a stu­dent of Linus Pauling and I reviewed the exist­ing sci­ence, and Dr. Ames shared shock­ing new evi­dence from his research cen­ter on how HFCS can trig­ger body-wide inflam­ma­tion and obesity.

Here are 5 rea­sons you should stay way from any prod­uct con­tain­ing high fruc­tose corn syrup and why it may kill you.

1. Sugar in any form causes obe­sity and dis­ease when con­sumed in phar­ma­co­logic doses.

Cane sugar and high fruc­tose corn syrup are indeed both harm­ful when con­sumed in phar­ma­co­logic doses of 140 pounds per per­son per year. When one 20 ounce HFCS sweet­ened soda, sports drink or tea has 17 tea­spoons of sugar (and the aver­age teenager often con­sumes two drinks a day) we are con­duct­ing a largely uncon­trolled exper­i­ment on the human species. Our hunter gather ances­tors con­sumed the equiv­a­lent of 20 tea­spoons per year, not per day. In this sense, I would agree with the corn indus­try that sugar is sugar. Quantity mat­ters. But there are some impor­tant differences.

2. HFCS and cane sugar are NOT bio­chem­i­cally iden­ti­cal or processed the same way by the body.

High fruc­tose corn syrup is an indus­trial food prod­uct and far from “nat­ural” or a nat­u­rally occur­ring sub­stance. It is extracted from corn stalks through a process so secret that Archer Daniels Midland and Carghill would not allow the inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist, Michael Pollan to observe it for his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The sug­ars are extracted through a chem­i­cal enzy­matic process result­ing in a chem­i­cally and bio­log­i­cally novel com­pound called HFCS.

Some basic bio­chem­istry will help you under­stand this. Regular cane sugar (sucrose) is made of two-sugar mol­e­cules bound tightly together – glu­cose and fruc­tose in equal amounts. The enzymes in your diges­tive tract must break down the sucrose into glu­cose and fruc­tose, which are then absorbed into the body.

HFCS also con­sists of glu­cose and fruc­tose, not in a 50-50 ratio, but a 55-45 fruc­tose to glu­cose ratio in an unbound form. Fructose is sweeter than glu­cose. And HCFS is cheaper than sugar because of the gov­ern­ment farm bill corn sub­si­dies. Products with HFCS are sweeter and cheaper than prod­ucts made with cane sugar. This allowed for the aver­age soda size to bal­loon from 8 ounces to 20 ounces with lit­tle finan­cial costs to man­u­fac­tur­ers but great human costs of increased obe­sity, dia­betes and chronic disease.

Now back to bio­chem­istry. Since there is there is no chem­i­cal bond between them, no diges­tion is required so they are more rapidly absorbed into your blood stream. Fructose goes right to the liver and trig­gers lipo­ge­n­e­sis (the pro­duc­tion of fats like triglyc­erides and cho­les­terol) this is why it is the major cause of liver dam­age in this coun­try and causes a con­di­tion called “fatty liver” which affects 70 mil­lion peo­ple. The rapidly absorbed glu­cose trig­gers big spikes in insulin—our body’s major fat stor­age hor­mone. Both these fea­tures of HFCS lead to increased meta­bolic dis­tur­bances that drive increases in appetite, weight gain, dia­betes, heart dis­ease, can­cer, demen­tia and more.

But there was one more thing I learned dur­ing lunch with Dr. Bruce Ames. Research done by his group at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute found that free fruc­tose from HFCS requires more energy to be absorbed by the gut and soaks up two phos­pho­rous mol­e­cules from ATP (our body’s energy source). This depletes the energy fuel source or ATP in our gut required to main­tain the integrity of our intesti­nal lin­ing. Little “tight junc­tions” cement each intesti­nal cell together pre­vent­ing food and bac­te­ria from “leak­ing” across the intesti­nal mem­brane and trig­ger­ing an immune reac­tion and body wide inflammation.

High doses of free fruc­tose have been proven to lit­er­ally punch holes in the intesti­nal lin­ing allow­ing nasty byprod­ucts of toxic gut bac­te­ria and par­tially digested food pro­teins to enter your blood stream and trig­ger the inflam­ma­tion that we know is at the root of obe­sity, dia­betes, can­cer, heart dis­ease, demen­tia and accel­er­ated aging. Naturally occur­ring fruc­tose in fruit is part of a com­plex of nutri­ents and fiber that doesn’t exhibit the same bio­log­i­cal effects as the free high fruc­tose doses found in “corn sugar.”

The take­away: Cane sugar and the indus­tri­ally pro­duced, euphemisti­cally named “corn sugar” are not bio­chem­i­cally or phys­i­o­log­i­cally the same.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.