Training & Nutrition - So exactly how bad IS High Fructose Corn Syrup?

I had never even heard of the stuff a month or two ago, and now I am hearing about it every day. It is in my favourite breads, granola bars and who knows what else. Is it purely a fructosey sugar, or is it part fat? Is it as bad on the evil scale as hydroginated oil? Or is it OK in small doses? Will eating it make me fat, or if I continue riding will it make little difference? I'm all in a panic now....

I had never even heard of the stuff a month or two ago, and now I am hearing about it every day. It is in my favourite breads, granola bars and who knows what else. Is it purely a fructosey sugar, or is it part fat? Is it as bad on the evil scale as hydroginated oil? Or is it OK in small doses? Will eating it make me fat, or if I continue riding will it make little difference? I'm all in a panic now....
I honestly didn't know so I looked it up. Here's what I found.

http://www.menstuff.org/issues/byissue/highfructose.html#dangers

Look for the book Fatland and get back to us. It's not that it's sugar, which is bad enough, it's that it is handled by the liver much the same as alcohol. Or something like that, it's digested differently. Goes right into the blood or something, check up on it, it's scary.

It seems to me that it is being used as a whipping boy.
All of that research is centered around people or rats who eat gobs of high fructose sugar and have mineral deficiancies from poor diets. Fructose occures naturally in large amounts in fruit yet the study recomends fruit, why, because it has minerals.

The problem isn't corn syrup, it's diets that lack all but a trace of actual food. Pop/soda, quadruple processed cheese in a can, Bleached ultra fine sweetend flour products(basic white bread and most "multi grain" breads), popsicles, partially/fully hydroginated fat, commertialy made hotdogs/sausage, and food coloring are not, and do not, have any resemblance to real food. People not only consume these non food substances but actually turn there nose up at real food, I don't know why they consume those things and tell their offspring to do the same, but I think it has something to do with natural selection.

High fructose corn syrup? It'll suck the paint off of your house and give your family a permanent orange afro.

Whever the food industry needs a new marketing rage, they make something else the devil. Now they've found out that if they demonize something that's in all foods, they have an excuse to make us buy replacement foods for almost everthing we eat. And wow, the new "healthier" foods cost just a little bit more!

My grandfather lasted 97 years eating things that were later decided to be horribly unhealthy. I'm done worrying about the latest food fad. Guess what... being alive makes you die. :rolleyes:

Now where's my steak...

its just sugar

It's super sweet as sugars go. It's a convenient way to get rid of excess subsidized corn crop, and so it is much cheaper than cane sugar. It's often found in cheap, mass-marketed, high-calorie food -- for me, the most important reason for avoiding it is that it means avoiding highly-processed foods with little to no real nutrition value. The potential for it to be downright unhealthy (http://www.drweil.com/u/QA/QA331712/ , http://www.drweil.com/u/QA/QA345895/) is also a factor.

Thank you for the links, alison and cheebahmunkey. I presume then that fruit, my #1 favourite food (even over ice cream believe it or not) is OK, even though it is the very definition of fructose. I guess the other contents of the fruit balance it out, as per the article. It MUST be OK, because humans have been eating it since the dawn of time, and even if it weren't OK, I wouldn't quit fruit. I'd rather die.

As for sugary drinks, I never drink them (with the exception of the emergency Powerade on yesterday's ride). I will try to avoid energy drinks with it. What bothers me is that I really love Nature Valley granola bars, and they have it as an ingredient. Do you think that in the process of riding it will do that much damage? I only eat granola as a riding fuel. Even if it acts like a fat, we burn fat riding anyway. It will be a real bore trying to find a granola bar without this ingredient, but I will try......overall my diet is very healthy so I hope the minimal amount I eat won't be too damaging.

I also read that crab cakes are the devil. I looove crab cakes. Man, you can't eat ANYTHING anymore!!! :mad:

Its sugar that is preferentially uptaken by the liver. That means its not very good for fueling your hungry muscles. Glucose a.k.a Dextrose is good at that.

Other than that: carbs are carbs. You body doesn't care if you eat one sugar or another... you can eat glucose (dextrose), or maltodextrin (long chains of glucose... "more complex,"), or white bread and it will be exactly the same to your body.

Carbs are carbs are carbs. The only thing that determines the insulin repsonse to alot of carbs is the AMOUNT EATEN. Period. Outside of a couple minutes, its all the same and doesn't matter to you unless you're in hypoglycemic shock.

What matters is what you eat with them: fiber, protein, fat, will all affect how fast the carbs are uptaken, and more importantly how long you remain full. Whole wheat pasta will keep you fuller longer than white pasta, etc.

its just sugar- I wouldnt get too worried about it. People have been eating fruit which comprises large amounts of fructose for a quite a while without any ill effects. Just don´t eat too much or you will get fat (obviously).

Even if you eat normal cane sugar (sucrose) you dont escape fructose. Cane sugar is broken down by an enzyme in the small intestine to glucose and fructose. So every molecule of cane sugar you eat you end up with a molecule of fructose anyway.

Fructose is simply converted into glucose by the liver. No big deal.

I'd avoid it given the choice. (and I would choose bread, beverages, etc without it.)

But when its converted there... it is preferentially stored there. Which means that it doesn't go directly to your muscles, as glucose would. It fills up your liver's glycogen stores first, THEN goes to feed hungry muscles.

Which is why it is teh suck. Sucrose or Dextrose are better alternatives.

It's really bad for you if you believe everything you read on the web. I'm not sure how much of it all to believe. I don't worry about it too much because I have never eaten much sugar and don't drink soda. Oh no! It's in my Powerbar, too!!!

But not in the cliff bar!

Here's one you can believe, on the internet... Entrez Pubmed (your tax dollars at work):


The ingestion of CHO (except fructose) at a rate of > 45 g/h, accompanied by a significant increase in plasma insulin levels, could lead to decreased muscle glycogen utilisation (particularly in type I fibres) during exercise.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=9458524&query_hl=3

LOL! I haven't the first clue what that means. :)

Today I went to the Whole Foods store and bought all kinds of different organic granola bars with no HFCS. I hope they're good!

It means that all carbs, when eaten pre-exercise, are good at preventing your muscles from burning their own sugary energy stores, except for fructose.

Its a crap sugar for exercise.

Here is an explanation, in laymen terms, about how HFCS is processed in the body.
http://nutrition.about.com/od/askyournutritionist/f/corn_syrup.htm

...quadruple processed cheese in a can...
Mmmmm cheese in a can, what a concept.

It means that all carbs, when eaten pre-exercise, are good at preventing your muscles from burning their own sugary energy stores, except for fructose.

Its a crap sugar for exercise.


the article you cited actually points in the opposite direction

To quote from the paper "Thus, at least during low intensity or intermittent exercise, CHO ingestion could result in reduced muscle glycogen utilisation in well trained individuals with high resting muscle glycogen levels"

Fructose was the only sugar tested that did NOT show these effects.

So if we are to believe this article we should all take fructose during exercise.

But I don't think that looking at these type of studies looking at individual hormone levels is really that helpful. The body is much more complex in real life.

I'm always puzzled when I read stuff like this. As long as I can remember there has been nothing but bad news about processed foods and how its killing us. Yet every report on life expectancy in developed countries I've read says that it keeps going up.

One would think if processed food was so bad that life expectancy would have peeked before the industrial revelotion, then would have gone down since and keep going down.

Go figure?

Health care gets more advanced for the developed world and those wealthy or fortunate enough to have access to it.

The "High Fructose" designation simply means that the fructose content is higher (usually around 55%) than in unprocessed corn syrup (~42%). The fructose content of HFCS is not massively greater than table sugar (sucrose, which is roughly 50/50 fructose/glucose). To your body, that difference is negligible and inconsequential.

The health risk propaganda pushers like to paint HFCS as the bad guy, but buried in the reports is the fact that overconsumption is the real culprit, not any specific ingredient. HFCS is only "linked to obesity" by being included in the general food types whose consumption has increased drastically over the past 30 years (soft drinks and other junk foods). As an ingredient it is not inherently "bad" (not any worse than table or other sugars).

..The health risk propaganda pushers like to paint HFCS as the bad guy, but buried in the reports is the fact that overconsumption is the real culprit, not any specific ingredient. HFCS is only "linked to obesity" by being included in the general food types whose consumption has increased drastically over the past 30 years (soft drinks and other junk foods). As an ingredient it is not inherently "bad" (not any worse than table or other sugars).

I think you are right. That reminds me of the difference between the often quoted "Money is the root of all evil" vs the actual "Love of money is a root of all kinds of evil". Let's put the blame where it really belongs.

Like I said, it's a whipping boy.

Like I said, it's a whipping boy.

Yeah . . . prepare to repeat yourself (again). This thread seems to come up about once a month.

:D
http://www.cripplefight.com/smileys/deadhorse.gif

if you want to be real, the only foods that are actaully "good" are raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. if you think about it we ate that for a couple million years before we started cooking stuff. we must have been on to something. processed foods are bad, mkay.

Well I just stopped by "The Beer Essentials" and picked up three pounds of corn sugar.(pure glucose, dextrose to be exact) I'll get some malt extract next time, I didn't even think of it untill just now.(a natural mix of glucose and maltose/maltodextrins derived from barley malt. Tastes like a malt ball[whoppers candy])

if you want to be real, the only foods that are actaully "good" are raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. if you think about it we ate that for a couple million years before we started cooking stuff. we must have been on to something. processed foods are bad, mkay.

And what was the average life span of these good folks eating these good foods. About 27 years?

Pretty bad. :)

Americans are the fattest folks on the planet for a reason. Let's give it up for high fructose corn syrup!

Kofffee

Americans are the fattest folks on the planet for a reason.

You're absolutely right. But the reason is we eat too much. Take care of that and no one will be talking about HFCS or any other bogeyman.



Let's give it up for high fructose corn syrup!

OK. While we're at it let's give a shout out to beef, chicken, salt, table sugar, wheat flour, ground corn, pork fat, and pretty much every other ingredient you can think of that is in any food we eat too much of . . . just to be fair.

Calories in - calories out = calories stored

the article you cited actually points in the opposite direction

To quote from the paper "Thus, at least during low intensity or intermittent exercise, CHO ingestion could result in reduced muscle glycogen utilisation in well trained individuals with high resting muscle glycogen levels"

Fructose was the only sugar tested that did NOT show these effects.

So if we are to believe this article we should all take fructose during exercise.

But I don't think that looking at these type of studies looking at individual hormone levels is really that helpful. The body is much more complex in real life.

Actually, no. The study indicates that muscles were depleted of glycogen when fructose was the sugar consumed, but NOT when others were. As in: they were used instead. The fructose was useless, so the muscles burned their own stores.