But, by using a tactic that both the corporate and religious right have wielded to devastating effect in their war against reality (global warming, evolution), the paid goons and loons hawking HFCS spew out pointless, utterly irrelevant complications in order to confuse the hapless consumer and thereby delay change. They want us to believe – or, at the very least, in the spirit of keeping an open mind, entertain the notion – that used in moderation, HFCS is no worse than regular sugar. To confront and rebut this assertion requires research and logic:

just a simple commonsense extrapolation from a series of interconnected facts including the low cost of HFCS and the rising availability of sugar-laden foods. But that takes time which few people are prepared to spend. And the practical upshot, after doing that research and thinking, remains the same as when you started: Avoid foods that use HFCS.

You really , really want to know why HFCS is not a good thing to have in the American food supply? Ok, since you want to waste your time, I’ll tell you, but before doing so, I must repeat a point stressed by Pollan and others: You don’t need to know anything about HFCS in order to eat in a healthy fashion. All you need to do, more or less, is not follow the American Corporate Diet. Or to put it more positively, you should eat great, delicious real food instead of foodlike substances manufactured by corporations. Specifically if you eat fruits, vegetables, legumes, etc, and meats in moderation- especially meats in moderation – you will eat a reasonably healthy diet. According to Pollan, most of us do not need to know anything more about the nutritional content of our food in order to eat well.*

Now, let’s let nutritionist Marion Nestle explain what HFCS is all about:

[High Fructose Corn Syrup] is just sugar in liquid form, differing from common table sugar (sucrose) mainly in how it affects the texture of foods.

I can see why HFCS seems like a nutritional villain: It is a marker for junk foods. Cheaper than sucrose, it turns up in all kinds of processed foods, particularly soft drinks. And there is nearly as much of it in the food supply as sucrose – 56 pounds per year per person versus 62 pounds for table sugar.

In its new advertising campaign, the Corn Refiners Association says of HFCS, “Truth is, it’s nutritionally the same as table sugar.” Truth is, I’d call it almost the same.

[A layperson’s explanation of the technical differences between sucrose and HFCS follows. The essential difference:]

The HFCS used in soft drinks has a bit more fructose than sucrose – 55 percent as opposed to 50 percent.

Whether this 5 percent difference matters at all depends on whether you are a metabolic optimist or pessimist.

If you are an optimist, you are happy that fructose – unlike glucose – does not stimulate the release of insulin, and in small amounts can be a useful sweetener for people with diabetes.

If you are a pessimist, you will fret that fructose is preferentially metabolized to fat, raising the possibility that HFCS – or any other source of fructose (but we won’t worry about fruit) – could have something to do with current obesity trends.

Let me interrupt here and say that I’m not sure why we shouldn’t “worry about fruit” – perhaps someone in comments can explain? – but my personal experience bears that out. I’ve found out that I can eat rather a large quantity of fresh fruit without any weight gain, or any health issues I’m aware of.

In 1981, at the dawn of the obesity era, the United States food supply provided 23 pounds of HFCS per person per year, along with 79 pounds of sucrose – 102 pounds total.

Today, the balance is 56 to 62 (118 pounds), with the increase entirely due to HFCS. Guilt by association! Glucose corn syrups and honey add up to yet another 18 pounds, but their use has not changed much over time. All told, the food supply provides a third of a pound a day of HFCS and sucrose combined, which works out to about 600 calories a day per person, just from these two sources.

And there, in a nutshell, is a major part of the problem. We have a significantly larger amount of sugared food available to us. Another part of the problem:

…people who drink sodas all day long can get a substantial portion of their daily calories from HFCS. Like other sugars, HFCS supplies calories but is devoid of nutrients.

If I understand Nestle correctly, she’s arguing that (partly) because HFCS is so cheap, soda is cheap. Many people are drinking soda to get a “substantial portion of their daily calories” from the inexpensive sugar (HFCS) used to make soda, but are getting no nutrients. It’s the fact that HFCS is a nutrient-free calorie source AND that it is cheaper than sucrose, making it economically attractive, AND that the availability of sugars in the food supply has increased that is the problem. Nestle sums it up, directly addressing the “consume HFCS in moderation” nonsense:

I’m not a registered dietitian and maybe that is why I think moderation doesn’t work for HFCS. Yes, HFCS has a place in the American diet and sometimes has cooking advantages over sucrose. And the research is still out on whether HFCS differs from sucrose metabolically. But the most sensible approach to HFCS and to sugars in general is not moderation. It is, “Eat less.”

Not being a nutritionist, nor having (yet) found a use for HFCS in my cooking, I can’t think of a good reason to eat the stuff at all. But Nestle’s advice – consume less HFCS – clearly is the minimally responsible way to discuss the consumption of this sugar. “Consume it in moderation” is very misleading, to say the least. It implies that we can, by maintaining our current consumption level, or by cutting back some trivial amount, use HFCS “in moderation.” That is not so.

At the very least, Americans should consume much less sugar, be it HFCS or sucrose, or both. Again, Nestle, quoted in Time:

Biochemically, [HFCS] is about the same as table sugar (both have about the same amount of fructose and calories) but it is in everything and Americans eat a lot of it — nearly 60 lbs. per capita in 2006, just a bit less than pounds of table sugar. High-fructose corn syrup is not a poison, but eating less of any kind of sugar is a good idea these days and anything that promotes eating more is not.”

One question that Nestle leaves open is whether HFCS is differentially worse for you than regular sugar. The case appears to be open. Needless to say, there are industry-sponsored studies that say no, it’s no worse than sucrose. But in poking around – and I certainly encourage anyone interested to bring more material to everyone’s attention in comments, including non-industry-financed studies that contradict the following study (if they exist) – I found this article that describes a potential direct link between HFCS and diabetes:

In the current study, Chi-Tang Ho, Ph.D., conducted chemical tests among 11 different carbonated soft drinks containing HFCS. He found ‘astonishingly high’ levels of reactive carbonyls in those beverages. These undesirable and highly-reactive compounds associated with “unbound” fructose and glucose molecules are believed to cause tissue damage, says Ho, a professor of food science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. By contrast, reactive carbonyls are not present in table sugar, whose fructose and glucose components are “bound” and chemically stable, the researcher notes.

Reactive carbonyls also are elevated in the blood of individuals with diabetes and linked to the complications of that disease. Based on the study data, Ho estimates that a single can of soda contains about five times the concentration of reactive carbonyls than the concentration found in the blood of an adult person with diabetes. [Emphasis added.]

So, after spending a little bit of time trying to find out whether there was any reality to the pro-HFCS commerical, what have I learned that I didn’t know before about HFCS and health?

Nothing practical at all.

The healthiest thing for people to do is to eliminate HFCS-laden food products from their diets and/or cut back on overall sugar consumption. The rest – that HFCS is not poison but rather a human-made sugar; that “the danger of HFCS” is simply a shorthand for the overall increased availability of cheap, nutrient-free calories; that consuming less HFCS is hardly the same as consuming HFCS in moderation, given current consumption norms – those are unnecessary details – interesting to nutritionists but that in no way change the practical issue: avoid foods with HFCS .

* While I clearly am not a nutritionist, Pollan’s argument makes both intuitive and intellectual sense to me. I strongly reccomend, if you are interested in details, two of his books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense of Food. I should point out that I have a few strong disagreements with Pollan, but not regarding his basic arguments on nutrition and the mess that is US food policy. Where I part with Pollan is in his criticism of the Food Network – he has little to no grasp of just how ignorant even well-educated Americans are of the basics of food prep; even the most inane drop ‘n stir shows of FN were an enormous help to me a year ago.

He also has advanced some truly preposterous suggestions. Very few people should be encouraged to forage the local parks for their food. That is simply a screwy idea, but with an apparently straight face, Pollan suggests exactly that in In Defense of Food. But all of this is really fodder for another post. If Pollan’s basic argument isn’t convincing to you, perhaps the great Mark Bittman will be; he makes essentially the same argument, but in a less intellectualized fashion, and fewer sidetracks.