Posted: Feb 10, 2011 9:09 pm
rtved wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:HFCS contains man made fructose which causes obesity. It's the cause of the biggest health crisis in the US. At least that's what my friend is telling his 7 year old son who reads labels and won't eat anything with HFCS in it.
What do you think?
Corn syrup is AS bad as Plain sugar(Or Glucose) in contributing calories.The More the fructose content higher is the calorie Load.
I did see a video of a long presentation a while back showing chemical reasons why HFCS is worse for you than sucrose, to do with how it's metabolised, but I certainly can't remember the science clearly enough to explain it.
However, I think there are several issues here. There is a lot of evidence mounting that ALL refined sugars are a much bigger contributor to obesity than people previously thought (and contrariwise, that consumption of dietary fats is not the catchall bogeyman that many have believed it was).
Refined sugars also have several other disadvantages, particularly (though not exclusively) relevant to children. The most obvious is that they cause tooth decay. Another however is that they cause fast erratic spikes in blood sugar level, followed by pronounced lows as insulin kicks in and usually over-compensates. This has major implications for mood, alertness, emotional well being and concentration.
It's mainly for these reasons that I try to feed as little refined sugar as possible to my children. I'm not that worried about obesity as they are both pretty slim - most children have a pretty high metabolism and run around a fair bit, and use a lot of energy just growing. OTOH there is a case for establishing good habits, and sugar can be highly addictive. They may not be fat now, but getting into a cycle of needing to perk themselves up with coke and chocolate every time the low hits is not going to do them any favours when they're older.
However I can't say I'm that concerned about the difference between HFCS and table sugar. They're both rubbish, maybe one is slightly more rubbish than the other, I don't know. I certainly think SOS's friend is deluded if he thinks table sugar is perfectly OK because it's "natural".
What he may be getting at in a rather convoluted way is that when fructose occurs naturally in fruits it is accompanied by fibre, and certain vitamins and minerals that aid in its digestion. There are about 15-20 grams of carbs in an average apple which is the same as 3-4 teaspoons of sugar (not sure how much HFCS), but the apple will be much better for you. It's a total package that humans have evolved over millions of years to eat and metabolise effectively. The sugar is the high-energy non-nutritious portion of that package. Not only does it not contain any fibre, but the body needs to USE vitamins and minerals to digest it, so its net effect upon the nutrients in the body is negative, not even zero.
Eating whole natural foods is generally better than eating refined processed ones. It would be a bit of a stretch to include table sugar in the first category though.
