Real Sugar requires more energy to absorb, HFCS loses again...

Many people are interested in 'getting healthy', or 'watching what they eat'. Which are great motives. However, one of the basics of being healthier is being conscious of what you are putting into your body, right down to the last ingredient on every label. There is a movement in the food industry, toward more natural and less processed foods, which, in my opinion, is a great way to get, and stay healthy. This movement begins and ends with people paying attention to what they are buying, and demanding better quality.

High Fructose Corn Syrup has long been controversial, but the bottom line is that it is unnatural. It's processed, and it's in everything.

A Little History: According to the American Chemical Society, high-fructose corn syrup entered the industrial market in the 1970s. Two researchers, Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi, developed the manufacturing process in 1957, discovering that they could alter glucose's molecular composition to make fructose. Later, in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Japanese scientist Yoshiyuki Takasaki and Osamu Tanabe further developed and improved the manufacturing process. By the mid-1970s, corn syrup had begun to replace sugar as a sweetener in many products. Partly because of the federal government's corn subsidies, it became cheaper to make, and its prominence grew.

Chemical Make-Up: High-fructose corn syrup, the most prominent type of commercial corn syrup, originally comes from cornstarch. Two enzymes, alpha-amylase and gluco-amylase, break down the starch to make glucose. A third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, turns the glucose into a mixture that includes fructose. The resulting syrup has a honey like thickness and is usually 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.

The very fact that this common product was created by researchers is proof that it is unnatural. There are no corn syrup farms, you cannot go out and harvest corn syrup from a corn tree as you would get pure maple syrup from a maple tree.

Psychology Professor Bart Hoebel tells News at Princeton:

It appears that in HFCS, fructose molecules are "free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized. " It may well take more energy to consume real sugar than it does to consume HFCS.

So, HFCS is more readily absorbed than plain white sugar. Our bodies have to work harder to breakdown sugar, than corn syrup. It seems that there could be a direct correlation to the overuse of HFCS in the majority of processed products to the increasing diabetes epidemic in our country, and some people are starting to catch on.

Check out this article about some major brands steering clear of corn syrup, and why:
http://industry.bnet.com/food/10001771/the-death-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup/

I challenge you to read the label of everything in your pantry, or at least a few things, and see what you've been eating, what you've been feeding your family. And to steer clear of corn syrup, in all forms, not only because it's more metabolically accessible to your body, but because it's found in a lot of products that sugar isn't, and never should be.