Posted: Oct 24, 2010 10:26 am
SpeedOfSound wrote:BlackBart wrote:Obesity is caused by eating too much fat and sugar and not doing enough exercise. You take in more calories than you burn, you become obese. End of. Nothing to do with evil chemicals in your coke or crisps.
Pretty much what I thought but there seems to be a whole cult growing up around this sort of thing. My first clue was when my friend seemed to thing there were two kinds of fructose. Man-made and natural. The only remotely logical argument he could come up with, after I informed him what utter bullshit that idea was, is that the manufacturing injected certain byproducts not found in nature.
Now this is what I would like know. What and how much. I think they use HCl, but so does my stomach. There is mention of heavy metals I think in some of the slam articles. Anyone?
According to Wiki;
"High-fructose corn syrup is produced by milling corn to produce corn starch, then processing that starch to yield corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose, and then adding enzymes that change most of the glucose into fructose. The resulting syrup (after enzyme conversion) contains approximately 42% fructose and is HFCS 42. The 42% fructose is then purified to 90% fructose, HFCS90. To make HFCS 55, the HFCS 90 is mixed with HFCS 42 in the appropriate ratios to form the desired HFCS 55. The enzyme process that changes the 100% glucose corn syrup into HFCS 90 is as follows:
1. Cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called oligosaccharides.
2. Glucoamylase - which is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat — breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose.
3. Xylose isomerase (aka glucose isomerase) converts glucose to a mixture of about 42% fructose and 50–52% glucose with some other sugars mixed in.
While inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry and used only once, the more costly xylose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it, allowing it to be used repeatedly until it loses its activity. This 42–43% fructose glucose mixture is then subjected to a liquid chromatography step, where the fructose is enriched to about 90%. The 90% fructose is then back-blended with 42% fructose to achieve a 55% fructose final product. Most manufacturers use carbon absorption for impurity removal. Numerous filtration, ion-exchange and evaporation steps are also part of the overall process."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fruct ... Production
Sounds like a fairly 'natural' process....