Eye View 

by David Charbonneau

An inconvenient, sweet truth

 

June 10, 2010



OK, I was wrong about high fructose corn syrup. It's no worse than any other sugar.

Last year in this column I said: "Large amounts of HFCS may be linked to kidney and liver disease." The statement would have been true about pure fructose. But confusingly, high fructose corn syrup is not high in fructose.

American corn refiners can take some blame for the confusion. What they mean is that HFCS is relatively high in fructose compared to ordinary corn syrup. In Canada it is more accurately called glucose-fructose because it has about equal amounts of both. It's an important distinction to make because pure fructose, the sweetest of all natural sugars, has been linked to elevated levels of triglycerides that harm the liver and an excess amount of uric acid that leads to gout.

I suppose I should have believed Audrae Erickson. She sent me a letter after my original column to let me know that "my characterization of HFCS as an unhealthy ingredient was misleading." Erickson's three-page letter quoted studies that compare HFCS favourably with other sugars.

I was skeptical of Erikson's arguments because, as President of Corn Refiners Association, she wasn't exactly unbiased. However, I now think she is right when she says: "Like sugar, honey, and some fruit juices, high fructose corn syrup contains equal portions of fructose and glucose."

I trust sources like the Centre for Science in the Public Interest. They are not sponsored by anyone but subscribers and their health newsletters carry no advertising. The centre agrees that HFCS has been unfairly vilified. High fructose corn syrup is no worse than or any other "natural" sugar such as honey, cane sugar, molasses, brown rice syrup, despite the fact that HFCS is manufactured.

Mother Nature gave us an appetite for sugar because it's contained in nutritious foods like milk and fruit. But we consume much more than mother would approve of. The average Canadian consumes 240 calories of sugar a day and children consume much more in soft drinks and sweetened foods.



 
Calories from drinks are especially dangerous because they are empty calories; they have no nutritional value. Also, calories consumed as liquids don't make us feel as full as an equal amount of calories consumed as solid food. This was an evolutionary advantage back when our ancestors were short of calories but not now when we are swimming in them. Liquid calories are killing modern humans.

Canadians are drinking twice as many soft drinks as they did in 1970. "When you give people more liquid calories before a meal, they don't compensate by eating less at meal time, the same way they do for calories from solid food," warns Rachel Johnson, professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont. In one study, young adults were given 450 calories of soft drinks a day for a month and they actually ended up eating slightly more calories in solid food.

And added sugar in solid foods can displace healthy calories. A useful way of thinking of daily intake is to imagine that you have a limited amount of calories to "spend" on a nutritious diet. Whatever is left over can be spent frivolously. Women have about 1,800 calories to spend and men a few hundred more. To find out more exactly what your calorie allowance is, go to mypyramid.gov and click on My Pyramid Plan.

In order to eat a nutritious diet within a limited calorie intake, you quickly find that you have spent most of your calories on vegetables, fruits, lean protein, dairy foods and whole grains and that there are only a few hundred discretionary calories left. That doesn't go far when most goodies contain both sugar and fat in abundance. And if you want a glass of wine, forget about the goodies. "It's been shocking to some people," says Professor Johnson "because if you're consuming alcohol regularly, you should be having even less added sugar."

Sugars that are a natural component of nutritious foods are a healthy choice. However, sugars that have been extracted from beets, corn and sugar cane no longer carry the nutritive value of the original food. Refined sugar should be used sparingly.

My apologies to corn refiners for making HFCS seem worse than the harmful group of empty-calorie foods it belongs to.



 David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca
 





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