4 ms·

How, specifically, is HFCS worse for you than eating honey, which is practically all fructose?

• tzs 15y ago
  HFCS is probably fine, in the sense that if you took something that was otherwise not bad for you and replaced whatever provides its sweetness with an HFCS of the same level of sweetness, it would not make the thing bad. The main reason that it is generally a good idea to avoid HFCS is that it is generally NOT found replacing other sweeteners in things that are good for you. It is generally found in things that are not good for you regardless of how they are sweetened. We know an impressive amount about how human nutrition works--but there is much more that we don't know. When some giant food company decides to make something by taking ingredients, breaking them down, and putting them together in some new engineered food there are two risks. (1) Being good for you may not have been high on the design requirements. Shelf life, consistency, ease of manufacture, cost, and marketing concerns could all be higher on the list. (2) Even if being good for you was a high priority, they might not actually achieve that due to our incomplete knowledge of human nutrition. When you see HFCS on the label, you know there is a really good chance you are dealing with an engineered food. In other words, HFCS is not bad--it just keeps bad company.
  • derleth 15y ago
    > When you see HFCS on the label, you know there is a really good chance you are dealing with an engineered food. In an otherwise good post, I have to respond to this. Every plant you eat is engineered. They're all, or almost all, the result of genetic modification in the form of selective breeding, often to the point the result would not survive but for constant human intervention. In a larger sense, all prepared food is engineered, often with complex chemical reactions going on as it is being prepared. Baking in particular is an exact science, and quite distinct from cooking, due to the chemistry required to make everything come out right. So 'engineered' isn't bad; 'badly engineered' (or, at least, 'engineered in unhealthy ways') is bad, and then list the ways it is bad. Don't just wave 'engineered' and 'unnatural' around as slurs. Food is too important for that.
• joenathan 15y ago
  It actually has just a little more fructose than it does glucose "honey is mainly fructose (about 38.5%) and glucose (about 31.0%)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutrition
• Lazare 15y ago
  Good question. The good news is that, according to the latest research, HFCS are no worse than honey, or indeed, table sugar. The bad news is that according to the same research, all three are absolutely terrible for you, and cause metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, fatty liver, and a laundry list of other very serious problems. Avoiding sugar is much more important than worrying about whether it's 50% fructose (as in table sugar) or 55% fructose (as in your HFCS-sweetened soft drink).
• bunderbunder 15y ago
  Honey is more expensive than HFCS, so if you use it as a sweetener you are a smidge more likely to run out of money before you become diabetic.