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Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism, especially in solution where sucrose will have already disassociated. T

Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism, especially in solution where sucrose will have already disassociated. The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup. I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup as if it is somehow worse than any other sugar. If you want to go down the rabbit hole, try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup. I'll be here waiting.

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jandrewrogers 2y ago
> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup. HFCS used in soda is 55% fructose. HFCS used in e.g. baked goods is usually 42% fructose, so it can have lower fructose levels than sugar.
- gorkish 2y ago
  HFCS is made by enzymatically converting glucose in corn syrup to fructose, so it stands to reason that the product can have any glucose:fructose ratio needed. Since humans categorically taste fructose as sweeter than glucose, it makes sense that HFCS is tuned differently for different applications and in situations where the ratio is very far away from 1:1 I do contend that HFCS could taste different than sucrose. Perhaps it was unwise for me to assume that most HFCS used is close to the 1:1 ratio of sucrose.
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- tptacek 2y ago
  "High fructose" corn syrup is "high" in fructose relative to normal corn syrup. Table sugar is naturally high in fructose already. The corn syrup you're suggesting is used in baked goods has less fructose than table sugar does.
  - mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
    Table sugar is “Nearly pure sucrose”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar
    - tptacek 2y ago
      ... yes? Table sugar is sucrose.
      - mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
        But you said table sugar had a high fructose content: “Table sugar is naturally high in fructose already”. Are you going to walk that back?
        jandrewrogers 2y ago
        Table sugar is 50% fructose. That’s just basic chemistry, sucrose is a disaccharide that is trivially cleaved upon ingestion. I am confused by your confusion. How high does it need to be to be “high”?
        mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
        You’re right, and I learned something. Sucrose breaks down into a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose in the gut. It’s not 50% fructose until you eat it though…
        tptacek 2y ago
        HFCS is 42% fructose if it's in food, and 55% if it's in a can of soda, and in that can of soda sucrose is dissociated into glucose and fructose within something like a week of being canned, because the acid in the beverage breaks the bond too. There is simply no useful distinction to make between sucrose and HFCS. High fructose corn syrup is called that because normal corn syrup has essentially no fructose, unlike table sugar.
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
I thought corn syrup was all glucose, and high fructose corn syrup had about half converted to fructose.
- chasil 2y ago
  Sucrose itself is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose Fructose is only processed by the liver, and can contribute to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Using maltose instead of sucrose will reduce the liver burden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltose
- gorkish 2y ago
  Correct; by converting about half to fructose you get a product that is functionally equivalent to sucrose. You could take it a step further and perform a condensation reaction to chemically convert it into the disaccharide (actual sucrose) but considering it's going back into something where it would just disassociate again, it would not be worth doing.
stetrain 2y ago
I think the issue is less about corn syrup sugar vs cane sugar, gram for gram, and more about the subsidization of corn and low cost of corn syrup creating an incentive to use more sugar in processed food products.
- treis 2y ago
  It's not like sugar is expensive. No more than a few cents worth in a 2L bottle of soda.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Sugar Price Supports and Taxation: A Public Health Policy Paradox - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5464749/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5464749/ | https://doi.org/10.1097/NT.0000000000000217 https://doi.org/10.1097/NT.0000000000000217 Summarized (per hombre_fatal's request): For over 80 years, U.S. government policies have protected domestic sugar production, resulting in elevated sugar prices and an annual cost of $1.4 billion to consumers (as of 2013). These higher prices, combined with federal support for corn production, have fueled the widespread use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as a cheaper alternative. HFCS production is driven by advanced technology and heavy corn subsidies, allowing it to dominate processed foods and beverages. The rise in HFCS use and overall sweetener consumption has contributed to increased intake of "empty calories," linked to obesity. Efforts to address the issue include taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) aimed at reducing consumption and funding nutrition education. However, these taxes face challenges, such as consumer compensation by shifting to other high-calorie foods and lack of evidence on long-term impacts on obesity. Nutrient-specific excise taxes at the point of purchase are hypothesized to be more effective. Additionally, U.S. sugar prices surged during 2009-2012 due to global weather-related production declines, but HFCS remained a slightly cheaper option. HFCS's affordability is rooted in subsidized corn production, which also benefits livestock industries by reducing feed costs.
    - gruez 2y ago
      I'm not sure what your point is. The argument isn't that corn syrup isn't being subsidized, it's that on a absolute basis the subsidy doesn't matter. If there's only 10 cents worth of sugar in a 2L bottle of coke, switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.
cpursley 2y ago
You don't need a double-blind test, you need an open your eyes test. Americans are not healthy and corn syrup is a big factor, thanks to the corn lobby, who pushes this at both ends via your tax dollar (subsides to grow it and SNAP junk food to push it). There's other factors like culture and lack of human-scale infrastructure, but Europeans, etc don't eat this stuff.
- stetrain 2y ago
  To see that a society with low levels of physical activity and high intake of sugars (of all kinds) and other highly processed foods results in some measurable poor health outcomes?
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Focusing on corn syrup suggests that you think we'd be in any different of a situation if junk food were made with cane sugar which is just as palatable as any other sweetener. Corn vs sugar is not the problem. Anti seed oil memers make the exact same mistake. Since we use seed oils in junk food, it must be the seed oils making us fat instead of how we guzzle down junk food. Therefore replacing canola with butter in junk food would somehow make junk food less appetizing or something? It makes no sense.
  - unwind 2y ago
    I believe for seed oil (a controversy about I know right about nothing) that the idea is that if it were replaced with butter that would cause the end product to be less harmful, thus reducing the overall health impact of eating a lot of it.
    - hombre_fatal 2y ago
      I didn't mean to start an overly hashed discussion, but butter is high in saturated fat. So we would expect junk food consumption to stay the same but now also have a larger atherogenic effect. For the sake of argument though, let's just say they are noninferior to each other. The point is that it's a red herring compared to our junk food culture and the ubiquity of junk food.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup. I'll be here waiting. That doesn't imply there isn't a taste difference, just that nobody's funded research for this. I certainly ascribe a certain flavor to HFCS, and "mexican cokes" also has a distinct flavor. Now might I be imagining stuff, and might there be other recipe differences that can explain peoples' preference? Of course. But I'd hope there's at least some evidence to point to that's at least as strong as my (very weak and anecdotal) evidence to advance if you're going to push this narrative that they taste the same.
- vel0city 2y ago
  There's a lot of reasons why Mexican coke would taste different. Glass bottles being the way people usually drink it, higher sodium content, differences in the water, other ingredient ratios that are different, and yeah maybe a little bit about sucrose vs HFCS. I know even US coke tastes different if you're having it out of a small glass bottle versus a 2L plastic bottle into a cup versus a can or even a can into a cup.
yabones 2y ago
The problem isn't composition, it's price and abundance.
andrewla 2y ago
> from the standpoint of human metabolism I mean ... is this serious? "Chemically identical" means something meaningful, but "from the standpoint of human metabolism" does some heavy lifting. If you had said "from the standpoint of our current incomplete understanding of human metabolism" then fine. When you say "the only difference" do you mean "the only different in the way they are metabolized" or do you mean "the only chemical difference"? In short I think our understanding of human metabolism and especially long-term adaptation of metabolic pathways to diet is extremely poorly understood and I would be wary before accepting any blanket statements about where the truth lies. There are certainly papers in animals about preferences between sucrose and HFCS, for example [1], and just looking at the references indicate a number of human tests of a similar nature. I don't think the question is whether we can taste the difference or which one we prefer when blinded, or whether the difference in taste is consistent between people or stable for an individual. The question is if there are latent health issues associated with them, and I think the jury is still out; it's very hard to do large scale studies on long-term effects of these things because they can't be done in a controlled way. Many would argue that writ large we have undergone a significant study across the population of the United States and the results don't look great, although there are a ton of confounding variables. EDIT: Note that I am not claiming that HFCS is definitively bad, I do feel that confidently stating the opposite is also epistemically poor hygiene. If I had to weigh the evidence of "appears to trigger identical metabolic pathways" with the evidence of "societies with HFCS adoption have an obesity problem" I would tend to err on the side of "HFCS bad". [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938411000096 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...
- ggm 2y ago
  I was trying to find words to say much the same. 5% variance could in principle be enough to alter homeostasis reactions in the hormone system. Maybe I misunderstand but the self-regulation mechanisms inside the body can titrate inside this level can't they? So the question would be if 5% variance in some things could alter blood levels over time, or how the liver reacts. I don't live in a high corn syrup economy. I'm not exposed to the risk as much, I'd be blovating to say much here. I also wonder if the artificial sweeteners are bad, precisely because of biomimcry: Fooling the body into thinking it's ingested sugar could have perverse outcomes.
daneel_w 2y ago
> "Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism ..." Really? Because I absolutely notice a clear difference in how "jittery" I get, and the different feel of the ensuing insulin response, from a US Coke Original vs. a European ditto made with sucrose. The difference in total sugar content is a mere 2.5%.
- tredre3 2y ago
  Sucrose breaks down to fructose and glucose very rapidly so by the time you consume it there's no longer any sucrose in the drink to the point that it is chemically identical to a soda sweetened with HFCS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
- vel0city 2y ago
  You ever run a double blind experiment on that or were you knowing it was US coke versus European coke?
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    I knew what it was, for every can I had. As someone who is hypoglycemic I don't need a double blind experiment to tell me what a sugar rush and an insulin response feels like in the chest.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Chemically, in an acidic and water environment like a can of soda, sucrose will quickly break down to the simple sugars in which HFCS has less glucose. So unless you're getting cans only a day or two from the factory, they're pretty much the same sugar-wise assuming the same mg/L (which they might be different, I don't know!). What are the labels? Are the total sugar content that different? (EDIT: Rereading, only 2.5% off...by volume or DV%?) Because if they're the same, the European coke would have a smidge more free glucose than an HFCS-55 would have by definition.
daneel_w 2y ago
Around 2010 I had the pleasure of trying a bunch of American candies of all sorts sent to me over the course of a few years by an American friend, and whether it's the HFCS or not there is a permeating flavor to the sweetness that is recognizable in almost everything I've tried. It's a sort of nutty flavor, curiously reminiscent of the unique taste of Dr Pepper. I noticed in Life Savers, Starbursts, Milk Duds, US Coke, the list goes on. Practically everything. And I could discern it when comparing US and European versions of one and the same product, e.g. a Twix or Snickers bar.
fatnoah 2y ago
> I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup as if it is somehow worse than any other sugar. My main issue with corn syrup is that it just feels different in my mouth. It has a "stickiness" to it than regular sugar does. I guess that's not exactly a bad thing since it effectively ended my soft drink consumption.
- jldugger 2y ago
  But most people don't eat raw corn syrup. And the sugars in sodas breaks down into the same stuff very quickly in the presence of acids. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    > But most people don't eat raw corn syrup. Growing up, I went through a very brief period where I put corn syrup on my pancakes instead of regular syrup. My parents weren't home, we had no syrup, and I didn't know exactly what corn syrup was except that it tasted sweet and was thick like regular syrup. I continued to do it just for the novelty until one of my parents saw me putting corn syrup on my pancakes and told me to knock it off. Thinking back on it now always grosses me out and makes me avoid corn syrup where possible, but eating it raw like that honestly didn't taste bad.
    - Neekerer 2y ago
      Back in the day (early 90s) my mom would sometimes serve Karo corn syrup on pancakes, even when we had maple syrup around. I thought it was a typical thing for a long time!
      - vel0city 2y ago
        I know a lot of families that would do that. You'd have a lot of recipies call for some amount of corn syrup but rarely go through a whole bottle. Mom probably didn't want to just throw it out, and the Aunt Jemima was pretty much the same with some caramel color and a few other added flavors. Might as well use up the two year old Karo on the kids waffles and get some fresh stuff for the next holiday baking season.
b112 2y ago
It's the bacteria that feed on corn syrup, and their metabolic off products which differ, and take resident in ye old gut.
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tedunangst 2y ago
It's also funny when people decry fructose and point to honey as the healthy alternative when it has more fructose than corn syrup.
- macNchz 2y ago
  While there are all sorts of claims about honey, I do think that it's easy to eat considerably less sugar without going totally cold-turkey by buying unsweetened things and adding honey yourself. Most people, I think, will just naturally use less than is added to typical products. A long time ago I decided to try buying plain yogurt and no-sugar-added muesli/granola and add honey to taste, rather than buying the standard commercial sweetened versions. I estimated at the time that it was like a 75% reduction in sugar at breakfast without any real thought or effort, and I never went back.
- vel0city 2y ago
  My main arguments for honey in some places is if you're eating local honey it might help with things like allergies. That and honey just tastes so dang good.
- JasserInicide 2y ago
  And there's also a good chance that the honey they're consuming is just honey-flavored corn syrup anyway
- int_19h 2y ago
  I find that the real benefit of using honey is that it actually has a fairly strong taste beyond just being sweet, and for me at least, this means that I end up using less of it (basically stopping before it'd overwhelm the taste of whatever it is I'm actually trying to eat).
hintymad 2y ago
I don't quite get how Americans love sugar so much. I mean, I I could smell the cloy miles away from a pastry shop, especially those in a supermarket like Safeway. The highest praise to an American pastry shop is usually "their stuff is not that sweet". I usually cut the suggested sugar by 2/3 from a US recipe and still make very sweet cakes. Oh, and last time I checked, every god damn ketchup contains 22(!) sugars. Why?
- panick21_ 2y ago
  I remember being in the US, and the friendly family friends talking about how we would get their favorite pie, sound awesome, Key Lime Pie, and I love lime. I tried it and I almost fell over backyards it was basically pure sugar with a the slightest taste of lime.
  - qwerpy 2y ago
    I’m American but have a lot of Chinese friends (through my wife). They talk about American desserts with the same disdain that I talk about Chinese desserts. “It’s too sweet” vs “this tastes like a dish sponge”. I love key lime pie. I got a gigantic one at Costco and subjected my wife’s friends to it. Many of them ended up liking it!
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for consumers to cook at home in the USA, industrial scale food production in the USA also benefits from HFCS subsidies and becomes additional lobbyists for HFCS and worm their way into recommended diets and become suppliers to public school cafeteias. We are all raised on very sweet breakfast cereals (at least in my public school cafeterias) from a very young age going from K-12 and continuing through cafeterias through college and kids have traditionally been taught fruit good but not juice bad so a lot of consumption via disposable drink boxes as well for a long time - I dunno if recent generations have been able to break any of these things starting kids off on sugar in large scale way.
winrid 2y ago
High Fructose Corn Syrup GI is 87 and sucrose's GI is 60, these larger spikes to your blood sugar over time leads to insulin resistance and diabetes...
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fsckboy 2y ago
>I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup there is good reason to be furious at corn syrup because low income 3rd world countries would love to sell the US their cane sugar at very cheap prices, but the US govt controls prices artificially high to protect US sugar growers.
perplex 2y ago
There must something different between corn syrup and sucrose. I have a corn intolerance where corn and corn byproducts trigger a migraine type headache. I assume there must be corn byproducts in corn syrup because it absolutely triggers my corn reaction, but cane sugar does not. Also from a purely taste standpoint there is a big difference to me as well. Lastly, you can’t make peanut brittle chewy without corn syrup, with sugar alone (which is how I make it) it’s very crunchy.
- arcticbull 2y ago
  Corn syrup is not HFCS. HFCS is just glucose and fructose. Corn syrup has a bunch of corn starches and various other sugars, so that makes sense.
latkin 2y ago
> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup. I think this is a typo? Should be "fructose:glucose"
brudgers 2y ago
The article is about High Fructose Corn Syrup (that’s what ordinary people ordinarily mean by “corn syrup” and HFC is “the corn syrup that took over the world”). HFC is glucose and fructose not sucrose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
captainmuon 2y ago
The argument that I heard a that sucrose does not readily disassociate, but has to be broke down by sucrase. Sucrose absorbtion is limited by the sucrase availability in the gut. In contrast corn syrup ist quasi pre digested, the body cannot regulate it's absorbtion at all. I'm not sure how true that is though.
- arcticbull 2y ago
  It's true, and it leads to a smaller spike in blood sugar. It's not clinically relevant though.
- mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
  Your gut can absorb about 90g per hour of glucose/dextrose and 30g per hour of fructose. This is what a competitive cyclist will consume in gel form.
aszantu 2y ago
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2020/how-high-fructose-intake-trigger-fatty-liver-disease https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2020/how-high-fructos...
- chthonicdaemon 2y ago
  Table sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose; the most common form of high fructose corn syrup contains 45% glucose and 55% fructose. The article you linked just talks about the dangers of a diet high in fructose at all. The parent you replied to was talking about why HFCS was seen as more damaging than table sugar.
starspangled 2y ago
I took up your suggestion to search around, this came up pretty easily https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/ The effect of high-fructose corn syrup vs. sucrose on anthropometric and metabolic parameters: A systematic review and meta-analysis > We found that HFCS was significantly associated with an increased CRP level, compared to sucrose. [...] > CRP is a biomarker for inflammation; and several previous investigations have shown that fructose-containing sweeteners,[...] Can you explain why their finding is invalid or how it does not contradict your claim (Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm not an expert in the field I don't pretend to be able to understand the subject.
pazimzadeh 2y ago
> Low doses of fructose are ~90% cleared by the intestine, with only trace fructose but extensive fructose-derived glucose, lactate, and glycerate found in the portal blood. High doses of fructose (≥1 g/kg) overwhelm intestinal fructose absorption and clearance, resulting in fructose reaching both the liver and colonic microbiota. > In many microbes, fructose is phosphorylated on its 6-position and thereby follows nearly the same metabolic pathway as glucose. In mammals, however, fructose phosphorylation occurs on the 1-position, not 6-position, catalyzed by the enzyme ketohexokinase (Khk) (Heinz et al., 1968). The location of this initial phosphorylation is a pivotal difference, as fructose 1-phosphate (F1P) can be directly cleaved into three-carbon units, whereas F6P must be phosphorylated on its 1-position by phosphofructokinase, the most heavily regulated enzyme of glycolysis, before such cleavage. Thus, fructose bypasses the gating step of glycolysis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032988/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032988/ "try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup" are you not able to tell the difference between regular coke and mexican coke?
- raverbashing 2y ago
  You're just missing the fact that cane sugar has almost the same amount of fructose as HFCS The coke taste difference could be due to HFCS vs table sugar, sure, but it also could be due to some other changes.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    I doubt it. Kosher for passover Coke, made in the US, has a similar taste. It seems weird that they’d make a different product formulation beyond the one that matters (sugar).
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  The fructose difference is marginal between normal and Mexican coke. In the acidic medium of a cola, sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose, just as it does with HFCS. HFCS has a bit more fructose, but not enough to make a paper about fructose suddenly relevant. As to the taste difference, Mexican cola has double the sodium. But even then, most people cannot taste the difference. They think they can, proclaim they can, and talk up how great Mexican coke is, but when actually put to the test they have basically random odds of being right or not. Fructose is mostly considered benign if consumed in moderation. You can get fatty liver if you consume to excess, but for most people it has no caloric value and is excreted from the body as a non-nutritive sweetener. Good related video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
newsclues 2y ago
Fructose is bad, so if corn syrup has more of it, that is not good. https://beckman.illinois.edu/about/news/article/2015/06/01/194d2053-38d3-4949-b30a-7dc5b16acdd7 https://beckman.illinois.edu/about/news/article/2015/06/01/1...
tim333 2y ago
It may not be that different from the standpoint of human metabolism but it's kind of ickey to have it inserted industrially into all your food due to corporate profiteering and backhanders. You could compare to a country like France say (I'm a Brit who visits the US and France), and the food tastes better, the people are slimmer and healthier and live longer (83 vs 79). I'd recommend a switch to the French system based on results, lifestyle and human happiness.
aklemm 2y ago
People are dismayed because no other great explanations for the health/nutrition crisis have surfaced. Offer a theory instead of just "no, that's not it".

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jandrewrogers 2y ago

> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup. HFCS used in soda is 55% fructose. HFCS used in e.g. baked goods is usually 42% fructose, so it can have lower fructose levels than sugar.

gorkish 2y ago
HFCS is made by enzymatically converting glucose in corn syrup to fructose, so it stands to reason that the product can have any glucose:fructose ratio needed. Since humans categorically taste fructose as sweeter than glucose, it makes sense that HFCS is tuned differently for different applications and in situations where the ratio is very far away from 1:1 I do contend that HFCS could taste different than sucrose. Perhaps it was unwise for me to assume that most HFCS used is close to the 1:1 ratio of sucrose.
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tptacek 2y ago
"High fructose" corn syrup is "high" in fructose relative to normal corn syrup. Table sugar is naturally high in fructose already. The corn syrup you're suggesting is used in baked goods has less fructose than table sugar does.
- mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
  Table sugar is “Nearly pure sucrose”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar
  - tptacek 2y ago
    ... yes? Table sugar is sucrose.
    - mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
      But you said table sugar had a high fructose content: “Table sugar is naturally high in fructose already”. Are you going to walk that back?
      - jandrewrogers 2y ago
        Table sugar is 50% fructose. That’s just basic chemistry, sucrose is a disaccharide that is trivially cleaved upon ingestion. I am confused by your confusion. How high does it need to be to be “high”?
        mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
        You’re right, and I learned something. Sucrose breaks down into a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose in the gut. It’s not 50% fructose until you eat it though…
        tptacek 2y ago
        HFCS is 42% fructose if it's in food, and 55% if it's in a can of soda, and in that can of soda sucrose is dissociated into glucose and fructose within something like a week of being canned, because the acid in the beverage breaks the bond too. There is simply no useful distinction to make between sucrose and HFCS. High fructose corn syrup is called that because normal corn syrup has essentially no fructose, unlike table sugar.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

I thought corn syrup was all glucose, and high fructose corn syrup had about half converted to fructose.

chasil 2y ago
Sucrose itself is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose Fructose is only processed by the liver, and can contribute to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Using maltose instead of sucrose will reduce the liver burden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltose
gorkish 2y ago
Correct; by converting about half to fructose you get a product that is functionally equivalent to sucrose. You could take it a step further and perform a condensation reaction to chemically convert it into the disaccharide (actual sucrose) but considering it's going back into something where it would just disassociate again, it would not be worth doing.

stetrain 2y ago

I think the issue is less about corn syrup sugar vs cane sugar, gram for gram, and more about the subsidization of corn and low cost of corn syrup creating an incentive to use more sugar in processed food products.

treis 2y ago
It's not like sugar is expensive. No more than a few cents worth in a 2L bottle of soda.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Sugar Price Supports and Taxation: A Public Health Policy Paradox - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5464749/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5464749/ | https://doi.org/10.1097/NT.0000000000000217 https://doi.org/10.1097/NT.0000000000000217 Summarized (per hombre_fatal's request): For over 80 years, U.S. government policies have protected domestic sugar production, resulting in elevated sugar prices and an annual cost of $1.4 billion to consumers (as of 2013). These higher prices, combined with federal support for corn production, have fueled the widespread use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as a cheaper alternative. HFCS production is driven by advanced technology and heavy corn subsidies, allowing it to dominate processed foods and beverages. The rise in HFCS use and overall sweetener consumption has contributed to increased intake of "empty calories," linked to obesity. Efforts to address the issue include taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) aimed at reducing consumption and funding nutrition education. However, these taxes face challenges, such as consumer compensation by shifting to other high-calorie foods and lack of evidence on long-term impacts on obesity. Nutrient-specific excise taxes at the point of purchase are hypothesized to be more effective. Additionally, U.S. sugar prices surged during 2009-2012 due to global weather-related production declines, but HFCS remained a slightly cheaper option. HFCS's affordability is rooted in subsidized corn production, which also benefits livestock industries by reducing feed costs.
  - gruez 2y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is. The argument isn't that corn syrup isn't being subsidized, it's that on a absolute basis the subsidy doesn't matter. If there's only 10 cents worth of sugar in a 2L bottle of coke, switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.

cpursley 2y ago

You don't need a double-blind test, you need an open your eyes test. Americans are not healthy and corn syrup is a big factor, thanks to the corn lobby, who pushes this at both ends via your tax dollar (subsides to grow it and SNAP junk food to push it). There's other factors like culture and lack of human-scale infrastructure, but Europeans, etc don't eat this stuff.

stetrain 2y ago
To see that a society with low levels of physical activity and high intake of sugars (of all kinds) and other highly processed foods results in some measurable poor health outcomes?
hombre_fatal 2y ago
Focusing on corn syrup suggests that you think we'd be in any different of a situation if junk food were made with cane sugar which is just as palatable as any other sweetener. Corn vs sugar is not the problem. Anti seed oil memers make the exact same mistake. Since we use seed oils in junk food, it must be the seed oils making us fat instead of how we guzzle down junk food. Therefore replacing canola with butter in junk food would somehow make junk food less appetizing or something? It makes no sense.
- unwind 2y ago
  I believe for seed oil (a controversy about I know right about nothing) that the idea is that if it were replaced with butter that would cause the end product to be less harmful, thus reducing the overall health impact of eating a lot of it.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    I didn't mean to start an overly hashed discussion, but butter is high in saturated fat. So we would expect junk food consumption to stay the same but now also have a larger atherogenic effect. For the sake of argument though, let's just say they are noninferior to each other. The point is that it's a red herring compared to our junk food culture and the ubiquity of junk food.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup. I'll be here waiting. That doesn't imply there isn't a taste difference, just that nobody's funded research for this. I certainly ascribe a certain flavor to HFCS, and "mexican cokes" also has a distinct flavor. Now might I be imagining stuff, and might there be other recipe differences that can explain peoples' preference? Of course. But I'd hope there's at least some evidence to point to that's at least as strong as my (very weak and anecdotal) evidence to advance if you're going to push this narrative that they taste the same.

vel0city 2y ago
There's a lot of reasons why Mexican coke would taste different. Glass bottles being the way people usually drink it, higher sodium content, differences in the water, other ingredient ratios that are different, and yeah maybe a little bit about sucrose vs HFCS. I know even US coke tastes different if you're having it out of a small glass bottle versus a 2L plastic bottle into a cup versus a can or even a can into a cup.

yabones 2y ago

The problem isn't composition, it's price and abundance.

andrewla 2y ago

> from the standpoint of human metabolism I mean ... is this serious? "Chemically identical" means something meaningful, but "from the standpoint of human metabolism" does some heavy lifting. If you had said "from the standpoint of our current incomplete understanding of human metabolism" then fine. When you say "the only difference" do you mean "the only different in the way they are metabolized" or do you mean "the only chemical difference"? In short I think our understanding of human metabolism and especially long-term adaptation of metabolic pathways to diet is extremely poorly understood and I would be wary before accepting any blanket statements about where the truth lies. There are certainly papers in animals about preferences between sucrose and HFCS, for example [1], and just looking at the references indicate a number of human tests of a similar nature. I don't think the question is whether we can taste the difference or which one we prefer when blinded, or whether the difference in taste is consistent between people or stable for an individual. The question is if there are latent health issues associated with them, and I think the jury is still out; it's very hard to do large scale studies on long-term effects of these things because they can't be done in a controlled way. Many would argue that writ large we have undergone a significant study across the population of the United States and the results don't look great, although there are a ton of confounding variables. EDIT: Note that I am not claiming that HFCS is definitively bad, I do feel that confidently stating the opposite is also epistemically poor hygiene. If I had to weigh the evidence of "appears to trigger identical metabolic pathways" with the evidence of "societies with HFCS adoption have an obesity problem" I would tend to err on the side of "HFCS bad". [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938411000096 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00319...

ggm 2y ago
I was trying to find words to say much the same. 5% variance could in principle be enough to alter homeostasis reactions in the hormone system. Maybe I misunderstand but the self-regulation mechanisms inside the body can titrate inside this level can't they? So the question would be if 5% variance in some things could alter blood levels over time, or how the liver reacts. I don't live in a high corn syrup economy. I'm not exposed to the risk as much, I'd be blovating to say much here. I also wonder if the artificial sweeteners are bad, precisely because of biomimcry: Fooling the body into thinking it's ingested sugar could have perverse outcomes.

daneel_w 2y ago

> "Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism ..." Really? Because I absolutely notice a clear difference in how "jittery" I get, and the different feel of the ensuing insulin response, from a US Coke Original vs. a European ditto made with sucrose. The difference in total sugar content is a mere 2.5%.

tredre3 2y ago
Sucrose breaks down to fructose and glucose very rapidly so by the time you consume it there's no longer any sucrose in the drink to the point that it is chemically identical to a soda sweetened with HFCS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
vel0city 2y ago
You ever run a double blind experiment on that or were you knowing it was US coke versus European coke?
- daneel_w 2y ago
  I knew what it was, for every can I had. As someone who is hypoglycemic I don't need a double blind experiment to tell me what a sugar rush and an insulin response feels like in the chest.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Chemically, in an acidic and water environment like a can of soda, sucrose will quickly break down to the simple sugars in which HFCS has less glucose. So unless you're getting cans only a day or two from the factory, they're pretty much the same sugar-wise assuming the same mg/L (which they might be different, I don't know!). What are the labels? Are the total sugar content that different? (EDIT: Rereading, only 2.5% off...by volume or DV%?) Because if they're the same, the European coke would have a smidge more free glucose than an HFCS-55 would have by definition.

daneel_w 2y ago

Around 2010 I had the pleasure of trying a bunch of American candies of all sorts sent to me over the course of a few years by an American friend, and whether it's the HFCS or not there is a permeating flavor to the sweetness that is recognizable in almost everything I've tried. It's a sort of nutty flavor, curiously reminiscent of the unique taste of Dr Pepper. I noticed in Life Savers, Starbursts, Milk Duds, US Coke, the list goes on. Practically everything. And I could discern it when comparing US and European versions of one and the same product, e.g. a Twix or Snickers bar.

fatnoah 2y ago

> I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup as if it is somehow worse than any other sugar. My main issue with corn syrup is that it just feels different in my mouth. It has a "stickiness" to it than regular sugar does. I guess that's not exactly a bad thing since it effectively ended my soft drink consumption.

jldugger 2y ago
But most people don't eat raw corn syrup. And the sugars in sodas breaks down into the same stuff very quickly in the presence of acids. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  > But most people don't eat raw corn syrup. Growing up, I went through a very brief period where I put corn syrup on my pancakes instead of regular syrup. My parents weren't home, we had no syrup, and I didn't know exactly what corn syrup was except that it tasted sweet and was thick like regular syrup. I continued to do it just for the novelty until one of my parents saw me putting corn syrup on my pancakes and told me to knock it off. Thinking back on it now always grosses me out and makes me avoid corn syrup where possible, but eating it raw like that honestly didn't taste bad.
  - Neekerer 2y ago
    Back in the day (early 90s) my mom would sometimes serve Karo corn syrup on pancakes, even when we had maple syrup around. I thought it was a typical thing for a long time!
    - vel0city 2y ago
      I know a lot of families that would do that. You'd have a lot of recipies call for some amount of corn syrup but rarely go through a whole bottle. Mom probably didn't want to just throw it out, and the Aunt Jemima was pretty much the same with some caramel color and a few other added flavors. Might as well use up the two year old Karo on the kids waffles and get some fresh stuff for the next holiday baking season.

b112 2y ago

It's the bacteria that feed on corn syrup, and their metabolic off products which differ, and take resident in ye old gut.

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tedunangst 2y ago

It's also funny when people decry fructose and point to honey as the healthy alternative when it has more fructose than corn syrup.

macNchz 2y ago
While there are all sorts of claims about honey, I do think that it's easy to eat considerably less sugar without going totally cold-turkey by buying unsweetened things and adding honey yourself. Most people, I think, will just naturally use less than is added to typical products. A long time ago I decided to try buying plain yogurt and no-sugar-added muesli/granola and add honey to taste, rather than buying the standard commercial sweetened versions. I estimated at the time that it was like a 75% reduction in sugar at breakfast without any real thought or effort, and I never went back.
vel0city 2y ago
My main arguments for honey in some places is if you're eating local honey it might help with things like allergies. That and honey just tastes so dang good.
JasserInicide 2y ago
And there's also a good chance that the honey they're consuming is just honey-flavored corn syrup anyway
int_19h 2y ago
I find that the real benefit of using honey is that it actually has a fairly strong taste beyond just being sweet, and for me at least, this means that I end up using less of it (basically stopping before it'd overwhelm the taste of whatever it is I'm actually trying to eat).

hintymad 2y ago

I don't quite get how Americans love sugar so much. I mean, I I could smell the cloy miles away from a pastry shop, especially those in a supermarket like Safeway. The highest praise to an American pastry shop is usually "their stuff is not that sweet". I usually cut the suggested sugar by 2/3 from a US recipe and still make very sweet cakes. Oh, and last time I checked, every god damn ketchup contains 22(!) sugars. Why?

panick21_ 2y ago
I remember being in the US, and the friendly family friends talking about how we would get their favorite pie, sound awesome, Key Lime Pie, and I love lime. I tried it and I almost fell over backyards it was basically pure sugar with a the slightest taste of lime.
- qwerpy 2y ago
  I’m American but have a lot of Chinese friends (through my wife). They talk about American desserts with the same disdain that I talk about Chinese desserts. “It’s too sweet” vs “this tastes like a dish sponge”. I love key lime pie. I got a gigantic one at Costco and subjected my wife’s friends to it. Many of them ended up liking it!
stevenwoo 2y ago
I think there's a vicious cycle of cheaper to make with HFCS, consumers like to eat things that are sweet/salty/fatty, so convenient to eat and less time for consumers to cook at home in the USA, industrial scale food production in the USA also benefits from HFCS subsidies and becomes additional lobbyists for HFCS and worm their way into recommended diets and become suppliers to public school cafeteias. We are all raised on very sweet breakfast cereals (at least in my public school cafeterias) from a very young age going from K-12 and continuing through cafeterias through college and kids have traditionally been taught fruit good but not juice bad so a lot of consumption via disposable drink boxes as well for a long time - I dunno if recent generations have been able to break any of these things starting kids off on sugar in large scale way.

winrid 2y ago

High Fructose Corn Syrup GI is 87 and sucrose's GI is 60, these larger spikes to your blood sugar over time leads to insulin resistance and diabetes...

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fsckboy 2y ago

>I've always been dismayed at the misdirected fury around corn syrup there is good reason to be furious at corn syrup because low income 3rd world countries would love to sell the US their cane sugar at very cheap prices, but the US govt controls prices artificially high to protect US sugar growers.

perplex 2y ago

There must something different between corn syrup and sucrose. I have a corn intolerance where corn and corn byproducts trigger a migraine type headache. I assume there must be corn byproducts in corn syrup because it absolutely triggers my corn reaction, but cane sugar does not. Also from a purely taste standpoint there is a big difference to me as well. Lastly, you can’t make peanut brittle chewy without corn syrup, with sugar alone (which is how I make it) it’s very crunchy.

arcticbull 2y ago
Corn syrup is not HFCS. HFCS is just glucose and fructose. Corn syrup has a bunch of corn starches and various other sugars, so that makes sense.

latkin 2y ago

> The only difference is that the ratio of fructose:sucrose is slightly (~5%) higher in corn syrup. I think this is a typo? Should be "fructose:glucose"

brudgers 2y ago

The article is about High Fructose Corn Syrup (that’s what ordinary people ordinarily mean by “corn syrup” and HFC is “the corn syrup that took over the world”). HFC is glucose and fructose not sucrose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup

captainmuon 2y ago

The argument that I heard a that sucrose does not readily disassociate, but has to be broke down by sucrase. Sucrose absorbtion is limited by the sucrase availability in the gut. In contrast corn syrup ist quasi pre digested, the body cannot regulate it's absorbtion at all. I'm not sure how true that is though.

arcticbull 2y ago
It's true, and it leads to a smaller spike in blood sugar. It's not clinically relevant though.
mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
Your gut can absorb about 90g per hour of glucose/dextrose and 30g per hour of fructose. This is what a competitive cyclist will consume in gel form.

aszantu 2y ago

https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2020/how-high-fructose-intake-trigger-fatty-liver-disease https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2020/how-high-fructos...

chthonicdaemon 2y ago
Table sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose; the most common form of high fructose corn syrup contains 45% glucose and 55% fructose. The article you linked just talks about the dangers of a diet high in fructose at all. The parent you replied to was talking about why HFCS was seen as more damaging than table sugar.

starspangled 2y ago

I took up your suggestion to search around, this came up pretty easily https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9551185/ The effect of high-fructose corn syrup vs. sucrose on anthropometric and metabolic parameters: A systematic review and meta-analysis > We found that HFCS was significantly associated with an increased CRP level, compared to sucrose. [...] > CRP is a biomarker for inflammation; and several previous investigations have shown that fructose-containing sweeteners,[...] Can you explain why their finding is invalid or how it does not contradict your claim (Corn Syrup and Sucrose are chemically identical from the standpoint of human metabolism)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm not an expert in the field I don't pretend to be able to understand the subject.

pazimzadeh 2y ago

> Low doses of fructose are ~90% cleared by the intestine, with only trace fructose but extensive fructose-derived glucose, lactate, and glycerate found in the portal blood. High doses of fructose (≥1 g/kg) overwhelm intestinal fructose absorption and clearance, resulting in fructose reaching both the liver and colonic microbiota. > In many microbes, fructose is phosphorylated on its 6-position and thereby follows nearly the same metabolic pathway as glucose. In mammals, however, fructose phosphorylation occurs on the 1-position, not 6-position, catalyzed by the enzyme ketohexokinase (Khk) (Heinz et al., 1968). The location of this initial phosphorylation is a pivotal difference, as fructose 1-phosphate (F1P) can be directly cleaved into three-carbon units, whereas F6P must be phosphorylated on its 1-position by phosphofructokinase, the most heavily regulated enzyme of glycolysis, before such cleavage. Thus, fructose bypasses the gating step of glycolysis. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032988/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6032988/ "try to find an actual proper double blind academic study that demonstrates a taste difference between sucrose and high fructose corn syrup" are you not able to tell the difference between regular coke and mexican coke?

raverbashing 2y ago
You're just missing the fact that cane sugar has almost the same amount of fructose as HFCS The coke taste difference could be due to HFCS vs table sugar, sure, but it also could be due to some other changes.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  I doubt it. Kosher for passover Coke, made in the US, has a similar taste. It seems weird that they’d make a different product formulation beyond the one that matters (sugar).
llm_nerd 2y ago
The fructose difference is marginal between normal and Mexican coke. In the acidic medium of a cola, sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose, just as it does with HFCS. HFCS has a bit more fructose, but not enough to make a paper about fructose suddenly relevant. As to the taste difference, Mexican cola has double the sodium. But even then, most people cannot taste the difference. They think they can, proclaim they can, and talk up how great Mexican coke is, but when actually put to the test they have basically random odds of being right or not. Fructose is mostly considered benign if consumed in moderation. You can get fatty liver if you consume to excess, but for most people it has no caloric value and is excreted from the body as a non-nutritive sweetener. Good related video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo

newsclues 2y ago

Fructose is bad, so if corn syrup has more of it, that is not good. https://beckman.illinois.edu/about/news/article/2015/06/01/194d2053-38d3-4949-b30a-7dc5b16acdd7 https://beckman.illinois.edu/about/news/article/2015/06/01/1...

tim333 2y ago

It may not be that different from the standpoint of human metabolism but it's kind of ickey to have it inserted industrially into all your food due to corporate profiteering and backhanders. You could compare to a country like France say (I'm a Brit who visits the US and France), and the food tastes better, the people are slimmer and healthier and live longer (83 vs 79). I'd recommend a switch to the French system based on results, lifestyle and human happiness.

aklemm 2y ago

People are dismayed because no other great explanations for the health/nutrition crisis have surfaced. Offer a theory instead of just "no, that's not it".