I 'm seeing more and more articles on nutrition sites that are basically
teaching the nutritional research that is available towards supporting
the advertisers that these sites relies on to make money. Many of these
advertisers make food products, and in a whole lot of these food
products you will find High Fructose Corn Syrup. Today I saw an article
in the 'today' section at Sparkpeople (where this blog used to be) with pictures of articles that said High Fructose
Corn Syrup is basically not different enough from sugar to avoid HFCS
more than sugar.
Hopefully clear from the title, I vehemently disagree. Sparkpeople's
nutritionist states that " There is no significant difference in the
overall rate of absorption between table sugar and HFCS, which explains
why these two sweeteners have virtually the same effects on the body."
Well these two might have the same absorption but they are not used the
same way by the body at all. A scientific study is mentioned very
shortly in passing as 'too small to be usable for the 'real world' that
is really important to show why HFCS is worse for people who are
working on losing weight than table sugar.
It's hard to explain without getting all scientific, but in effect HFCS,
after having been consumed, makes it much easier for energy taken in as
food afterwards to be stored as fat instead of burned as energy. On
the other hand, table sugar is when it's consumed going through the
liver, where is decided if the energy is stored as fat or burned. But
HFCS does not go through the liver, does not pass go and receive $200,
and instead immediately is made into fat. well.blogs.nytimes.com/2
008/07/24/does-fructose-ma
ke-you-fatter/?_r=0
The nutritionist in the first linked Sparkpeople article claims that the
study is not applicable due to the small size of it (6 people) but as
someone who has done extensive classes in statistics I know that an n=6
sample size can be significant enough if the study is set up in the
right way. Other people claim that since you never eat pure sugar or
pure HFCS in real life, but always mixtures of the two, it's not
applicable ( www.cbsnews.com/news/su
gar-high-fructose-corn-syr
up-worse-for-your-health/
halfway down the page) I think that money is motivating the choice of
many of these people not to take the study seriously, or to do further
studies focusing on this difference and how much effect it has in real
life.
After all, such scientific studies have to be paid by someone. HFCS has a
lot to gain if these studies show no difference and the small study
that shows there is a difference indeed is quickly ignored or
marginalized. So studies that probably rely on self-reporting people in
what they eat show no difference in weight for high use of HFCS in a
diet meant to help with losing weight. ( www.nutritionj.com/conte
nt/11/1/55/abstract
) I do not know what this sample size was, who funded the study, and
if the food eaten was self-reported or not. All of those have a
statistical effect in judging the study's usefulness.
I would love to see the study that is being ignored with the 6 people
repeated with maybe more real-life setups and a larger sample size. I'm
not sure who would pay for it though, that would be a pretty significant
expense compared to the smaller study. That is why the foods that are
pure natural and not pushed by any organizations are not researched very
often. In the mean time, I know that the corn grown to create HFCS is
genetically manipulated if grown in hte US, that it has to be made in a
factory so that my grandmother would not recognize it as a food, and
that there -seems- to be a correlation between the obesity explosion in
the States and the use of HFCS. All if this can be explained away as not
significant, but I believe the jury is stlil out on these factors. We
won't know if it is significant until decades have passed, and it will
be like they used to tell us to eat margarin and not butter and now all
trans fats are shown to be bad for us.
I wish they would stop putting HFCS into everything. In organic or
health stores you can still find foods that have cane sugar instead of
HFCS, but I live on a very low budget. In the mean time I know I should
avoid sugar, and this article is not meant to tell people to consume
more sugar. I am struggling hard to avoid both cane sugar and HFCS. But
if I fail, and if I can afford to buy food at hte organic or health food
store, I will definitely choose sugar over HFCS. Sugar is not good for
me, but HFCS I believe could be quite a bit worse. To each their own,
but that is the problem with nutritional science, there is no 'one size
fits all' conclusion. Except maybe that vegetables are good for you...
Written on Thu Nov 19, 2015
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