HFCS by Any Other Name is Still HFCS

Once again, the food industry is claiming that consumers are too stupid to understand what ingredients on a label mean. This time, The Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA; they are requesting permission to change the name from “High Fructose Corn Syrup”  to “corn sugar”.

Seriously? What do they think changing the name will do? We still know how bad HFCS is for us; our bodies still don’t metabolize the man-made sugars in the same way.

Apparently, the higher-ups in the food industry think that the name “high fructose corn syrup” is too confusing for us peasants to understand.

Audrae Erickson, president of The Corn Refiners Association, had this to say:

Clearly the name is confusing consumers. Research shows that ‘corn sugar’ better communicates the amount of calories, the level of fructose and the sweetness in this ingredient.

HFCS has become widely known by the general population as an unhealthy ingredient; research by the NPD shows that 58% of Americans are concerned about health risks posed by HFCS. This petition to the FDA seems more like an attempt at a coverup; many Americans would not realize that “corn sugar” is the same thing as HFCS. Therefore, until we got the news spread around about the dangers of this “new” ingredient, people would still be endangering their health and the health of their children.

The most logical solution to the fact that people are discovering how unhealthy HFCS is for our children would be to stop using it. This apparently reeks of too much common sense for the food industry people!

Ms. Erickson goes on to say that,

The name is confusing, and consumers don’t understand that [HFCS] has the same calories as sugar. They also think it’s sweeter tasting. That’s why the alternate name provides clarity for consumers when it comes to the ingredient composition and helps them better understand what’s in their foods.

My question is this: how are our brains, which this woman obviously thinks are puny, going to see the same ingredient differently simply because they change its name? IF The Corn Refiners Association is successful with getting the name of HFCS changed to “corn sugars”, it will be a vast injustice.

Information about our foods is not made readily available; they don’t publicize things like this on the evening news. Instead, we have to actively search for the information. Because of this, the general public will not be aware that “corn sugars” are just another name for the same killer ingredient: high fructose corn syrup.

Read More: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/a-new-name-for-high-fructose-corn-syrup/

1 Comment

  1. A concerned citizen on February 11, 2016 at 8:10 pm

    Honey and fruit juices are better for you. The sugars in honey and fruit juices are easily metabolized by our bodies, as that is what our ancestors ate.

    So what if I told you that HFCS contains the same sugars as fruits and honey?

    Fructose is a large part of HFCS, being what High Fructose Corn Syrup is named after. Fructose is named after “fructus”, the Latin name for fruit. Fructose is known to be easily digested by the body, and gives us a short buzz of sugar. A 200 calorie serving of pomegranate juice, whose benefits you have described in the blog, contains 23.5g of fructose. If fructose is so bad, then why are you drinking fruit juices?

    Glucose makes up most of the rest of HFCS. Glucose is the main fuel for cells, which break down the glucose and use it to form ATP, the molecule which gives us life. Glucose isn’t very harmful. Honey is a mixture of glucose and fructose syrup, and it is considered somewhat healthy. Glucose is the product of eating the following: starch, lactose, sucrose, and galactose. These are all found in most foods, all of which are considered fine to eat.

    Higher sugars make up the final >1% of HFCS. These are larger molecules, such as galactose and sucrose. Sucrose is the main constituent of table sugar, and galactose is only found in very small amounts. These are all fine to eat, as our body has many natural proteins designed to break these down. Unless you have digestive problems or diabetes, these are all fine to eat.

    The rest of the molecules are found in very, very, very small amounts. Regulations prevent these molecules to appear in even microscopic amounts which are harmless. While HFCS may contain stuff such as dirt, there is more dirt in clean rain water.

    So when an industry is slandered by blogs such as yours, to the point when people question the healthiness of something as simple as HFCS, of course the industry would want to change the name of HFCS to something which more accurately describes it such as “corn sugar”. HFCS is healthy, and I believe that the industry should be allowed to change the name of it to something easier to understand, such as “corn sugar”.



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