The Great High-Fructose Corn Syrup Debate

Maybe it's a good thing that the Corn Refiner's Association (basically a lobbying group for said industry) has created a commercial promoting High-Fructose Corn Syrup. Maybe it means they're scared of losing sales because people are becoming more health conscious! We can only hope... If you haven't yet seen the commercial, which definitely freaked me out when I saw it for the first time the other day, check it out here.

It bothered me at first, but that was just because I had a generally negative attitude toward HFSC. My senior year I did a project on childhood obesity, and our research led us to conclude that the advent of HFCS contributed to the rise in obesity that is rampant today. It provided a cheap way to domestically produce sweetener that made food more appealing, jacked up calorie content, and gave things a longer shelf-life so people were more apt to buy in bulk since they weren't worried about things going bad (also the food was less expensive).

Now these reasons have nothing really to do with the actual chemical makeup of HFSC, just the economic and eating-habit-changing implications of the sweetener. This commercial, and its Internet counterpart sweetsurprise.com, focus more on promoting HFSC because it is "natural", has no more calories than table sugar, and is completely "safe" by FDA standards.

I won't argue that they're claim isn't true, mainly because I'm not in the mood to do that much research. But I will say that I think they're missing the point. You can give HFSC as many positive labels as you want, but the really issue is that people are eating TOO MUCH of it. And maybe that's because of commercials like this and people who rationalize that "natural" =" good for you" without actually thinking about it.

Everyday we get conflicting messages about food consumption - fad diets that fade and are replaced with completely different diets, government regulated guidelines that may or may not be influenced by lobbyists (like the CRA), certain trigger words that make us feel good (or bad) about what we're eating (such as trans-fat, lo-fat, fat-free, and all that other stuff most of us don't really understand) - and this commercial just adds to the confusion.

So I'm going to conclude that a) the commercial is unsettling and should be taken with a grain of salt and b) "all things in moderation" is a pretty good mantra to go by. So sure, reach for the HFSC (it's in pretty much everything you eat, anyway), but then maybe for a later snack you'll grab an apple or some carrot sticks. How's that for a compromise?