The government-backed sugar cartel in the US simply drove up the cost of (cane and beet) sugar, resulting in a comparative cost advantage for HFCS. I am surprised at how many people think HFCS is a corporate conspiracy, and are wholly ignorant of the government's role in the matter.
I am well aware of that...why make ethanol from corn, or sugar , when you can use switch grass, which is cheaper, requires less energy to grow, is more resistant to adverse weather than your other cash crops. Or when you can take a byproduct of an existing industry such as from saw mills or cotton gins. Sugar Cane and Corn is very expensive compared to these options.
It is worth noting that here, as is typical in politics, a focused interest (sugar growers) beats a diffuse interest (the general public). We would all benefit from ending this ridiculous practice. But we would individually benefit very little, and it isn't worth much from us to do so.
But it gets worse. Because there is a second layer of beneficiaries here. Corn growers. And they have great political power, as is seen in the subsidies they get and the ethanol additives that are legally require (which damage engines, and are a net negative on energy once you consider the costs of growing that corn).
Not the least among the advantages that corn growers have politically is the simple fact that they are important in Iowa. Which means that any national politician who dreams of being President, or of working with any other that has that dream, has very direct incentives to keep corn growers happy.
It's mainly that it's always the first primary election and the presidential primaries are very much momentum-based. If you crash and burn in the Iowa caucus you're basically done.
Iowa isn't "designated" a swing state; it emerges as one every election season because of its particular mix of urban and rural counties and its proximity to Chicago and Minneapolis, both Democratic bastions, and its large number of reliably conservative rural voters.
You might be interested to read "The Myth of the Rational Voter" , or other material by Bryan Caplan; he argues that the reason these policies thrive is not the uninformed public. Caplan argues that the public has strong beliefs in favor of the tariffs and protectionism, as a result of anti-foreign, and anti-market bias.
There is an interesting conspiracy theory suggesting that New Coke was released to mask the switch of sugar to HFCS in the then re-introduced Coke Classic.
The page linked in the article is worth a couple of chuckles: "The US sugar industry is almost as important to our economic vitality as is a steady supply of affordable energy. Subjecting sugar to the unpredictable forces of global laissez faire capitalism would likely lead to 'dumping' by countries whose own sugar industries are much more protected than is ours."
In a sense, this quote isn't wrong. That's exactly what the sugar producing countries would do. The U.S. almost certainly does not have a competitive advantage in sugar production, and if the industry were deregulated domestic sugar production would end, and we'd become sugar importers. And that would be okay, because sugar isn't the strategically important commodity it once was.
But the same reasoning applies to steel and arms manufacturing too. The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas.
> The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas.
I think I know the rationale behind this statement, but I'm always curious as to why we hold on to these beliefs. If we let industries move around based on true competitiveness, stripped of subsidies and other anticompetitive practices, we might find that to be a force for good.
That said, I've come to believe that this is most likely a minority view. Everyone believes in free markets until it starts affecting their bottom line.
Think about it like this, lets say we let people make Steel wherever they want and everyone starts making it in China, causing the local production to grind to a halt due to being unable to compete.
Now a year later, China decides it doesn't want to export to us anymore and bans exports of Steel to the US, now we are screwed for at least 6 months, since we don't have the ability to create the product anymore.
The difference with sugar is we do have an alternative available (corn syrup) so the loss wouldn't be as big.
1. Maintain a 6 months (or whatever time is necessary to restart production) stockpile
2. Have a highly credible policy that, if any foreign country actively opposes free trade of anything important, an ICBM loaded with a nuclear warhead is launched on their main government building or biggest city
3. Change things so that there is no advantage to producing abroad, if possible (e.g. allow unlimited immigration, remove taxation, remove minimum wages, remove regulations, etc.)
There's always advantage to producing abroad, no country can be optimal producer of everything, due to varied geography, natural resources and cultures.
1. Maintain a 6 months (or whatever time is necessary to restart production) stockpile
2. Have a highly credible policy that, if any foreign country actively opposes free trade of anything important, an ICBM loaded with a nuclear warhead is launched on their main government building or biggest city
3. Change things so that there is no advantage to producing abroad, if possible (e.g. allow unlimited immigration, remove taxation, remove minimum wages, remove regulations, etc.)
> now we are screwed for at least 6 months, since we don't have the ability to create the product anymore.
So stockpile it. Just buy 6-month's supply of cheap foreign steel and store it in a warehouse somewhere. Now if things turn south we just draw down the "strategic steel reserve" for a while - we have 6 months to either reclaim our prior ability or find another trading partner willing to sell to us.
It takes a lot more than 6 months to rebuild war-making capability. It's not just the physical production that moves off-shore, it's the know-how and expertise. As we saw with the computer industry, it's not just production that moves off-shore. Eventually, so does much of the design capability.
Thought experiment: if the key to saving our civilization was on the moon, how long would it take us to redevelop the technology and infrastructure to get back there?
So what happens when you have a years long war? You can't rebuild a steel production industry from scratch while also fighting a war. More important than that, you can't keep the expertise in a stockpile. If we let e.g. shipbuilding go overseas, it could be a decade before we could gather together the expertise again to build a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, even if we had a stockpile of steel.
I don't think you understood what I meant by "buy options".
So let's flesh that out a little. Suppose steel costs $2/unit from a US firm, but costs $1/unit on the world market. We can go to companies in various other countries and pay some nominal fee (say, $50k/year) to buy an OPTION to buy their future steel output, not at the current price, but at twice the world price. So in the best case scenario there's no war, the steel company gets paid a nominal fee for an annual option that never gets exercised, and the US military saves far more by buying low cost steel through the years than the cost of the options. But if there ever is a war, we execute the option and get to buy (on 6 month's notice) that factory's full capacity at a 100% markup, crowding out whoever else they would otherwise have sold that steel to at a much lower price. So in wartime we pay foreign companies exactly what we would have had to pay a US firm - twice the world market rate - without first having to wait to build any US factories!
The foreign firm just has to allow for this in their contracts - that they reserve the right to cut off any buyer (paying a suitable penalty fee) with 6 month's notice. Now our stored 6-month supply is exactly enough to tide us over until options can reasonably be exercised (and penalty fees paid) that provide us with substitute sources.
We sign those sort of contracts with firms in a variety of countries in a variety of geographic locations. Unless our primary low-cost supplier gets mad at us and ALL those "safety" countries also get mad at us at the same time, we have an adequate safety margin.
All our steel - heck, all our ships - gets made for HALF the current cost until such time as there actually IS a war with our main supplier, whereupon it all gets made for exactly the price it would have cost to make domestically, had we kept that industry around.
Okay, let's make the example even MORE explicit. In normal times we'd buy most of our actual supply from China or Taiwan, because they're the cheapest, fastest, most flexible supplier. We'd buy those side OPTIONS (that are never exercised other than in a time of war) from companies NOT in China. We'd buy the options from companies in, say, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Canada. Where the steel is typically a little more expensive per unit.
In the middle of a war with China or Taiwan, a foreign company in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, or Canada is unlikely to consider us "the enemy", so they'll have no trouble selling us all the steel they can make at the inflated prices we're willing to pay. The contract and the higher-than-normal price it specifies, should suffice to compensate them for inconveniencing their normal customers, foreign or domestic.
Um, you mean cuts off 25% of our potential supply. What happens then is we exercise more of our options (or just negotiate new deals) elsewhere to make up for it. In short, pretty much the same thing that happened when China declared war in the first place. However many plants in however many countries they bomb, we're still better off than if we had used and they had bombed the same plants in the US. Fewer American casualties, certainly.
(Are you expecting China to declare war on us and bomb every country in the world that we do business with? That seems like a pretty expensive and unlikely proposition. It's also worth noting that international trade all by itself tends to improve communications and reduce the potential for hostilities.)
If you have an interest in self-defense, it's a good idea to retain a meaningful industrial base (eg domestic steel manufacturing). There are numerous other strategic economic reasons also.
> it's a good idea to retain a meaningful industrial base (eg domestic steel manufacturing).
Whenever we "protect" one industry, that has negative downstream effects on all our other industries that depend on it.
In the case of steel, the fact that we protected steel manufacturers made our own auto manufacturers much less internationally competitive than they would otherwise have been, because US automakers were paying twice as much for their steel as companies in Japan and Taiwan were paying for theirs. Similarly, the US nearly killed Apple Computer at one point when it tried to "protect" the domestic semiconductor industry, making locally-assembled macs artificially more expensive than foreign-assembled clones due to the artificially-inflated price of imported DRAM chips.
The best way to "retain a meaningful industrial base" is let our companies compete on the world market.
The "free" market, at least as we understand it, depends on a fiction: interactions between people happen in terms of transactions in private property according to enforced contracts. Neoclassical economics doesn't really consider what an efficient economy looks like when "killing someone and taking their stuff" is a valid action within the system.
We can get away with this inside a country, because governments monopolize the use of force, and so you can talk about "free" markets in terms of interactions between people in terms of market transactions, without factoring into the equation the possibility of use of force.
But as between countries, that fiction fails. Countries are in the state of nature. In that state, force is as valid an interaction as trade. Any discussion of the interactions between countries, therefore, must consider how force affects any trade dynamic between the countries.
So why do we keep a domestic steel and arms industry, even though it might be more efficient in terms of global GDP to let some other country manufacture those things? Because it's a huge disadvantage in terms of waging war to have your arms manufacturing done by some other country. We would have a hard time bombing China if our bomber aircraft were manufactured there...
As an American, yes, I think it would be. I like the current status quo, where we consume 10x as many resources per capita as the Chinese. Eliminating the ability to bomb specific other countries would curtail our ability to maintain that margin.
Um, we can consume 10x as much per capita as the Chinese because we produce 10x as much per capita as the Chinese. And we could produce (and hence, consume) even more if we wasted less effort on making war and propping up inefficient old industries.
Hearing someone bluntly say this made my skin crawl, you're okay with enormous economic imbalance in your favor backed up with no greater justification than the collective willingness of the society to which you belong to engage in mass murder against the members of societies to which you do not. That really has no ethical implications for you at all, personally?
Well reading your post rather bothers me because you automatically assume murder. Attempting to maintain the 'status quo' via military sounds like a default defensive action to me, fending off the attacks of others.
Actually I'd dispute that; modern warfare between major powers can only waged by proxy wars between lesser powers who do not have recourse to nuclear options. In the future as the destructive potential of smaller and smaller actors increases over time, humanity will have to get used to the idea that it can't go around just acting like a pack of spoiled murdering bastards with an entitlement complex, or it will end up destroying itself as the power threshold of the disenfranchised actors approaches mutually assured destruction scenarios.
So perhaps in light of this it might be a good idea being practical to get used to that fact and stop acting like endless bullying war is a realistic long term foreign policy?
You quoted the wrong half of the sentence. It's maintaining the status quo that sounds defensive. And apparently I used the word 'default' in a confusing way. I did not mean 'default go to'. I meant that maintaining the status quo is by default a defensive thing.
On top of that, it's not actual 'bombing' that you use most of the time to do that, but the 'ability to bomb'. Nobody actually has to get blown up.
> The "free" market, at least as we understand it, depends on a fiction: interactions between people happen in terms of transactions in private property according to enforced contracts.
No, the idea that a "free market" would lead to a perfect society with perfectly efficient allocation of resources depends on that fiction. It's still quite possible to prefer a free market while still acknowledging the inevitability of market failures. Remember, governments inefficiently allocate resources too, for many of the same reasons as do markets.
> The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas.
Why, exactly, wouldn't that be okay? We'd only lose "all" domestic production if foreign production were quite a lot cheaper, in which case the benefit from switching is huge and ongoing. If you're worried about wartime security, here are three ways to mitigate that concern:
(1) Stockpile. Order enough (cheaper, now that it's imported) steel in advance that we'd be able to meet likely short-term needs.
(2) Diversify. Keep an eye on the foreign supply and make sure that we're at least perserving the option to buy from more than one country so if one trading partner gets angry we can just switch to buying from another.
(3) Be polite. Stop invading and/or bossing around every other country on the planet, so our trading partners aren't likely to have good reason to want to embargo trade with us.
The fact that more international trade would mean we might have to actually care what other countries think is a pretty huge argument in favor of it.
You have to consider the taste, it tastes nicer because fructose has only 5 carbon in it's ring instead of 6 which leads to more pleasurable experience as it makes it fit better into the sweetness sensing in the mouth[1]
With Corn Syrup you get both glucose and fructose together whereas with sugar you just get sucrose. Another reason would be that more corn is grown in the US than sugar cane which makes it more efficient to produce corn syrup instead.
Yes, but it does not really matter. It tastes differently than HFCS, but not that differently and both are sweet :)
In practice, nobody is bothered by very slightly different taste. Coca Cola uses different sweeteners (including artificial ones) in different parts of world and mostly nobody notices.
It "tastes" like synthetic crap. Before I was put on dietary restrictions I made my own ginger ale, because the stuff that was sweetened with HFCS tasted acidic and far, far too sweet.
In the documentary King Corn [1] they suggest that HFCS is ubiquitous because of the government subsidies for growing corn. The surplus of corn was so large, they started looking for creative ways to use it all up. HFCS was one of those, as-is feeding it to livestock (which traditionally don't eat corn).
The subsidies are such that a cattle farmer can actually make a profit buy growing corn, selling it (with subsidies), then buying corn back to feed their own livestock.
> The subsidies are such that a cattle farmer can actually make a profit buy growing corn, selling it (with subsidies), then buying corn back to feed their own livestock.
I fail to see how this is enlightening, of course growing corn creates a profit. If you are excluding the base profit of the corn, why wouldn't a subsidized market create additional profit?
That is the way subsidizing works, you get more than just the purchase price. You could subsidize production, but it is easier and has other benefits to subsidize sale.
This debate has come up on HN repeatedly; it is again worth pointing out that HFCS is "HF" relative to "CS", not to table sugar. Table sugar is ~50% fructose, HFCS 55%.
The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not which sugar is being used.
HFCS alarmism probably works to the advantage of junk food companies, who can simply market equally unhealthful products built on table sugar as a premium alternative.
HFCS alarmism probably works to the advantage of junk food companies, who can simply market equally unhealthful products built on table sugar as a premium alternative.
That's fine, let them try. It would equalize the market among these players and those who are already not using HFCS.
Or, the customers would suffer by purchasing more unhealthy junk food, which is what economics suggests will happen when you reduce the cost of something, especially when its demand is spurred by physical dependence.
We might, but if ending it simply routed the market from corn syrup to cane sugar, what difference does that make for consumers? It seems like the most you'd be able to say is that it might make junk food cheaper.
There are people who seek out and drink Mexican coke since it contains sugar (see also pepsi throwback). There were also jobs lost as the candy industry moved from the US to Canada and Mexico.
I'm a little rusty on this subject (I might come back later and link some sources/videos), but my main issue is not with HFCS vs table sugar, but just the fact that HFCS is in everything nowadays. This is partially because of corn subsidies by the government (which makes HFCS cheaper than its "actual" price). However, this is also because at one point in this country we decided that fat was bad (with a bad study), and we thus took it upon ourselves to remove fat from our diets, and in fact largely succeeded. Yet all the things we were trying to prevent (like heart disease), went UP. What happened was manufacturers replaced the fat in many products with HFCS. Its to the point now where you go to the store and many brands of bread contain HFCS, its almost inescapable. I certainly don't want that replaced with normal sugar, I just want the price of HFCS to be accurate, and for the government to stop making drastic declarations in nutrition that can lead to these really strange and unexpected consequences.
>>> This is partially because of corn subsidies by the government (which makes HFCS cheaper than its "actual" price).
Both sugar and corn are heavily subsidized, but sugar AFAIK is subsidized by tariffs (i.e. higher prices for the consumer) and corn by transfers. I have no idea why - probably "biofuels" fiasco has a lot to do with it, but not sure if it is the main cause.
>>> for the government to stop making drastic declarations in nutrition that can lead to these really strange and unexpected consequences.
You mean, the government to stop regulating what we eat and trying to protect us from ourselves? Fat chance.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
People have a fsckin' right to eat unhealthy and who the hell are you to fix prices of their food so that they can't?
That's one thing. Another one is that such schemes are really, pragmatically bad as they make people involved in them make political decisions which protect their unfair advantage at the cost of goals important to the general public. Do you really want people to vote for whomever promises to pass bills giving them most benefits at the cost of others? Well, I know that people sometimes do that anyway, but IMO it shouldn't be encouraged with successful examples lasting for two centuries.
And at last - people are pretty capable of getting what they want. If you make it slightly more expensive, they'll simply pay. More expensive - they'll switch to worse alternatives (HFCS, anyone?). Even more - illegal production. Outright ban - sugar mafia. I mean, the US already tried to "fight alcoholism" some time ago and it almost worked.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of people who successfully fought a world power and founded country which became a world power. I think this counts more than a majority vote in parliament, not less.
In the frictionless vacuum of a message board debate, you can imagine there being several portions of the US Constitution that could be placed into conflict with the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps we don't have to pay income tax after all!
They do not. Obesity, most especially childhood obesity, puts the sufferer at risk to all kinds of nastiness that doesn't kill you outright but is very expensive to treat. I have the right to keep the morbidly obese out of my wallet.
So just to clarify your point of view, would you also agree that smoking should be completely banned, and to varying degrees, any unhealthy activity should be actively prohibited?
I don't think it would make that much difference. The corn industry is subsidized by the govt anyway, so i am pretty sure corn syrup would still be cheaper.
When I worked at USDA, it was noted that it likely would have led to cheaper biofuels in the United States to the extent that such extensive legislation and tax breaks wouldn't have been needed to jumpstart ethanol in the US.
So on the consumer end, as far as consumers are taxpayers, it would have meant paying for zero support programs instead of two. If you want to go out on a limb, cheaper ethanol leads to cheaper petrol due to a substitution effect, so potentially it would have made all food products marginally cheaper thanks to lower shipping costs.
The linked article is a good one though. It is a funny subject to bring up in the bureaucracy because as economists, we all knew the harm it did, but as bureaucrats, we also knew that the policy wasn't going anywhere.
It may not be a big change in the scheme of things, but if less government involvement in an industry can be accomplished without any noticeable effects to that industry, then isn't it almost true by definition that the government involvement should be decreased?
Agreed that the most important point is that liquid carbohydrates and plain sugars are generally bad, and that that's 90% of what people should take away from discussion like this.
That rat study came up 900 days ago in the last HFCS debate I saw here, and indicates mostly that rats seem to modulate their eating better with sucrose than with HFCS; it's also controversial. Is there a single human study we can now cite that attributes harm to HFCS that is specific to HFCS and not simply to consumption of sugars?
Sucrose is exactly half-and-half fructose and glucose; it is composed of one of each, bound together. This is important because it means that it can't be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream. It has to be broken apart first, and the enzyme that does so is in the intestine. This means that its absorption rates and effect on the glycemic index are different from HFCS. Diabetics care about this.
While I can't really argue against you, partially because you're tptacek and partially because you're not wrong here, it's quite irritating to see somebody have a good conclusion and faulty premises.
Do you have a human study you can cite regarding the glycemic impact of HFCS vs. table sugar? My understanding is that the body is very adept at breaking that sucrose bond.
While sucrose absorption is certainly slower than pure glucose absorption, the amount of sugar that eventually goes into your bloodstream is equivalent, and the energy yield is also roughly the same (splitting that one glycosidic link isn't really that energy-intensive).
I guess an argument could be made that fast-acting monosaccharides are more problematic for diabetics since their bodies can't deal with spikes easily, but for the rest of us there is really no (scientifically accessible) difference at all. Our food just contains too much readily accessible energy.
wasn't there a yale study that tied fructose to appetite regulation recently? I never actually found and read the main study, but i think there have been prior studies suggesting similar things
The first article concerns fructose in general, not HFCS in particular. Cane sugar contains comparable amounts of fructose.
The second article says, in its abstract, "However, when HFCS is compared with sucrose, the more commonly consumed sweetener, such differences are not apparent, and appetite and energy intake do not differ in the short-term. Longer-term studies on connections between HFCS, potential mechanisms, and body weight have not been conducted".
yup, i read that. that older study doesn't really argue for or against, though.
one thing that really bothers me though is that having grown up in germany i have big problems swallowing hfcs. mostly because it tastes dull, and feels very acidic in my throat. i've asked other people from overseas and they reported similar things.
the only thing I could find though is the addition of sulfuric acid. if you have some information on that, i'd be grateful.
The time dimension is important for diabetics, and perhaps also arguably important for non-diabetics and/or pre-diabetics.
If you're diabetic, having fruit juice handy during an insulin reaction is preferable to having a sucrose-based product, IIRC. (I had a family member who was diabetic, although it's been many years since they passed.)
> This means that its absorption rates and effect on the glycemic index are different from HFCS.
They aren't. The enzyme sucrase is needed to break it down but it cuts through sucrose like a hot knife through butter.
Scientists have already studied this and found sucrose and HFCS have basically equivalent responses in "blood glucose, insulin, leptin, ghrelin, and appetite."
There currently is no good evidence to suggest that one is worse than the other; either they are both inert or they are both evil. The difference between them is too small to matter in moderate consumption, and in excess both are harmful to health:
Actually, table sugar is sucrose, a different compound to fructose. Fructose absorption is actually faster in 1:1 fructose:glucose mixes.
So there are differences in the metabolism of fructose in the two situations, even if minor, and as a general point of chemistry it's not really correct to say that table sugar is half sucrose any more than it's correct to say alcohol is half methane.
But in general yes, HFCS as a substance is not the problem. HFCS as a subsidized foodstuff that gets wedged into too many things, that's the issue.
Sucrose is glucose and fructose, stuck together by a single bond (hence the 50% fructose). The first thing your digestive system does is break that bond.
It's also far from the first thing that happens during the digestive process, as it takes place in the duodenum. If you ate a 1:1 mixture of glucose/fructose they would be present higher up the digestive system. Fructose also absorbs faster in the 1:1 proportion than in other proportions.
I'm not saying Sucrose Good/HFCS Bad (could be the other ay around for all I know), just that there are differences.
Understanding that correlation != causation, the trend lines for obesity, diabetes and the use of HFCS is pretty alarming anyhow and should be investigated further.
Why do I have a particular distaste for HFCS? I remember a time when Americans would come to Canada and say, "where are all your fat people?" Our local newspapers would run stories about how Americans perceive our "indulgent" culture. You don't see those stories anymore. Now we're toe-to-toe in (childhood) obesity, diabetes. Data shows that the US started to use HFCS in liquids and baked goods as early as the 1970s. Canada on the other hand, HFCS has only recently become a regular ingredient in food. I know this is anecdotal and not in anyway scientific, but I have to wonder what other trend could have caused increases in caloric consumption at this magnitude. My understanding is that cane sugar is processed by every cell in your body and HFCS is processed by only your liver. The liver allegedly becomes overworked. If true, this domino effect has grave consequences.
I couldn't say for certain, but I do see that as a threat as well. I will say, among the people I know who have diabetes, only 1 is known for having a taste for sweetened beverages. I think what you're saying plays a role, but how do we explain the many who don't drink sugar water on a regular basis? For me, it seems like there's only a few ingredients in our food that make it through a broad spectrum of Western diet/culture, and of those ingredients only 1 seems to be eligible.
Americans consume, per capita, just a hair under 2 eight ounce servings of soda (presumably not including juice, which is morally the same as soda, energy drinks, and other energy-dense drinks) per day. But obviously, the distribution of that consumption is much lumpier than that, and is presumably biased towards people with metabolic syndrome.
It's the same molecules. Like everyone else has noted, 1 sucrose molecule = 1 glucose + 1 sucrose. The proportion of glucose to fructos is just slightly different in HFCS vs table sugar (55/42 or 42/53, versus 50/50).
To your correlation/causation point, why don't you think that this is the result of having massive, inexpensive, and domestic sources of a molecule that makes the human brain want to eat more? Rather than some minor distinction in the ratio of the monosaccharides its composed of?
Sugar is basically a drug with immediate gratification with only longer-term side effects to the health. Unless there are laws, companies that put the most of it in their products will 1) make more money because it's cheap and 2) sell more product. I don't know what happened in Canada, but I would guess either those interested in profiting even at the expense of public health either out-competed more ethical competitors or were able to weaken public health laws. Who knows, maybe the US public was the first target, and they went to the north only after our pancreases/adipose tissues were completely saturated...
No, its not. Sucrose is a molecule. Fructose is a different molecule. Glucose is another different molecule.
> Like everyone else has noted, 1 sucrose molecule = 1 glucose + 1 sucrose.
You mean 1 sucrose molecule is broken down at the first stage of its metabolism into 1 glucose and 1 fructose, rather than sucrose being an infinitely recursive combination of 1 glucose + 1 sucrose.
> The proportion of glucose to fructos is just slightly different in HFCS vs table sugar (55/42 or 42/53, versus 50/50).
Yes, the proportion of fructose to glucose in HFCS is higher than than the fixed 1:1 ratio that sucrose is broken down into (the exact amount varies, because HFCS isn't a fixed ratio). Since fructose and glucose have different effects (one notable difference is that there is at least some indication that fructose doesn't trigger the body's mechanisms for satiety while glucose does), this can be significant.
Dear god, how pedantic would you prefer that I be? It's a pain to type out monosaccharide and disaccharide all the time. Also, chemists will typically not use the term, "infinitely recursive".
Outside of that, your point is totally valid. The location in the body where the enzymes that break the glycosidic linkage means that the absorbtion curve is different. But I was not addressing that point. Just that the body doesn't break them down differently, after they sucrose molecule is split in the small intestines.
This debate has come up on HN repeatedly; it is again worth pointing out that HFCS is "HF" relative to "CS", not to table sugar. Table sugar is ~50% fructose, HFCS 55%.
The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not which sugar is being used.
You can't look at the percentage difference of fructose and conclude that HFCS is not much different than regular sugar.
The reason HFCS is so terrible is because it is chemically different. As opposed to table sugar, where the sucrose, glucose and fructose are chemically bound, in HFCS the gluctose and fructose are unbound. What this means is that HFCS is digested much more quickly, often before the body can signal the brain that it is full.
Do you have a human study that establishes that? Because as I understand it, this isn't true, and that human studies have shown insignificant differences between the two. The chemical bond you're referring to is one we have evolved to break extremely quickly.
Unfortunately, I've noticed this is quite common on HN. The top comment is quite often some long discussion about some minor point of the article. I really wish HN would implement collapsed comments so I could choose to expand the discussion or just easily skip to the next ones which address the article directly.
High Fructose Corn Syrup is not always 55% fructose. HFCS can vary greatly in that ratio according to [this USC study](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20948525) that analyzed the fructose ratio of a variety of HFCS only sweetened soft drinks.
They found the actual ratio varied from 47-65%, with the mean amount being 59%, and the amount in several major brands was 65%.
The fructose ratio in HFCS is not regulated or reported, so you could be drinking anything. With a mean of 59% a 9% difference to table sugar is a big difference, and many popular brands have a 15% difference.
According to the study, the difference between HFCS and sugar is not a myth.
The other advantage that sugar has over HFCS has nothing to do with the chemical composition. It's more expensive.
I don't think that "which sugar" is better is necessarily the debate that is going on here. It is the protectionism of the sugar industry with a huge amount of money going to waste because of it.
---
Honestly, the amount of sugar/HFCS in various products in the US is absolutely insane. Hell, I pay a premium to buy whole natural peanut butter compared to Jif or the other crap which all contain sugar.
These days I spend more time looking at labels trying to find out what crap is in my food that shouldn't be there, chemicals, sugars, all kinds of salts, and preservatives. Ugh.
You would think it would be easier to find peanut butter with less ingredients. I'm a peanut butter fiend, I love it so much I eat it with a spoon. The first time I had peanut butter without sugar was a few months ago, and it was like a miracle. So delicious!
Don't try Japanese peanut butter then, I think it contains more sugar than it does peanuts... ><
[Seriously, the stuff is like candy paste. Although I grew up eating American mass-market peanut butter, I can't stomach the Japanese stuff; even in a sandwich with something sweet like jam/jelly, it just tastes wrong...]
When I drink a soda made with cane sugar, I am satisfied: I've had a nice little sugar rush, I'm happy, now I want to get on with whatever else I want to do.
When I drink a soda made with HFCS, I am teased: my body has been reminded how tasty something made with cane sugar is, and I'd really like to have something. Oh hey here's that half-drunk 2-litre of Coke, guess I'll have some more of that. Repeat.
Now that I've realized this difference, I buy and drink a hell of a less soda. And am much more happier when I drink what I do.
(This is of course in the middle of various other changes - it's after switching to diet soda for a while, and completely kicking the habit for a few years.)
On the rare occasions when I drink soda these days I just think, I would have been happier with water. Also if I'm gonna consume 300 calories I'd rather have a taco or something.
HFCS is almost in the same place as sugar if we look at it in terms of regulation.
Both are victims of price fixing through government subsidies. It doesn't matter if you don't contribute to the purchase of the product, as your tax dollars already fund its creation.
An interesting point in the article:
"Coke suppressed demand for cane sugar formula because it would cost more to produce and consumers would not pay the extra cost."
I live in a state where Coke with sugar is widely available. The taste between that and HFCS is like night and day. Too bad the rest of the states do not have that choice.
I find Coke with sugar tasting better but I almost never drink it anyway since both are drinks that are very bad for my health. Not theoretical statement - I have stopped drinking sugary sodas when my blood analysis showed bad signs, and now I drink water and unsweetened tea and occasional juice. And, frankly speaking, I don't miss it too much - now that I'm out of the addictive habit, both sugar and HFCS one taste not that good to me.
What do you guys think of Stevia[1]? Has been recently approved in the EU for use as an all natural sweetener and I see products popping up here and there pretending to be based on it.
I have eaten stuff with Stevia, not sure what it is about it though, but it causes my muscles to ache.
I can be completely fine, eat something sweetened with Stevia and about an hour or two later my muscles will start aching. It is worst in my shoulders :-(.
I've used Stevia a few times, but am not a fan. While it's definitely sweet, it's a very different sweet compared to sugar. When drinking something (like coffee) with Stevia, I notice that it's sweet on a different part of my tongue, and it's a latent sweet - initially the drink tastes completely unsweetened until it reaches the back of my mouth.
Even though too much refined sugar is bad for you (there was very little tooth decay before 1850), I don't like ingesting HFCS because it makes things taste horrible. It doesn't taste the same as sucrose, which has much better flavour.
OTOH the more things have HFCS the fewer sugary products I eat, which is good for my health. Wouldn't work if everybody did that, of course.
>Once in a while I come across an animated debate on health benefits of sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is enzymatically produced mixture of glucose and fructose that approximately matches the chemical composition of sucrose, aka sugar. It is not this debate that is my concern;
Why are people discussing what the article specifically says it is not about?
The only thing i can't grasp... If sugar is such a certain deal, why there is even one person investing in a HFCS factory instead of yet another sugar came farm?
I skimmed the article, but I did not see mention of the U.S.'s petro-chemical-based agriculture. Without the outsized contributions that petro-chemicals make to the production process of corn and corn syrup (engine fuel, fertilizer, distillation, etc.), corn syrup and HFCS production would be much more directly (as opposed to externalized costs) expensive.
I guess we should also toss soil erosion into the mix. Productive topsoil is a finite resource, and modern agriculture -- while it has improved somewhat, recently -- is expensive in this regard.
165 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadHere's a similar article with an interesting graph: http://mjperry.blogspot.ca/2011/01/big-sugar-cartel-cost-con...
Saw dust and wood chips are not food (unless you're a mushroom).
But it gets worse. Because there is a second layer of beneficiaries here. Corn growers. And they have great political power, as is seen in the subsidies they get and the ethanol additives that are legally require (which damage engines, and are a net negative on energy once you consider the costs of growing that corn).
Not the least among the advantages that corn growers have politically is the simple fact that they are important in Iowa. Which means that any national politician who dreams of being President, or of working with any other that has that dream, has very direct incentives to keep corn growers happy.
Because it starts with an 'I'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke#Conspiracy_theories
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
And the whole category of Cokelore:
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cokelore.asp
In a sense, this quote isn't wrong. That's exactly what the sugar producing countries would do. The U.S. almost certainly does not have a competitive advantage in sugar production, and if the industry were deregulated domestic sugar production would end, and we'd become sugar importers. And that would be okay, because sugar isn't the strategically important commodity it once was.
But the same reasoning applies to steel and arms manufacturing too. The difference is, it wouldn't be okay if all our domestic steel production went overseas.
I think I know the rationale behind this statement, but I'm always curious as to why we hold on to these beliefs. If we let industries move around based on true competitiveness, stripped of subsidies and other anticompetitive practices, we might find that to be a force for good.
That said, I've come to believe that this is most likely a minority view. Everyone believes in free markets until it starts affecting their bottom line.
Now a year later, China decides it doesn't want to export to us anymore and bans exports of Steel to the US, now we are screwed for at least 6 months, since we don't have the ability to create the product anymore.
The difference with sugar is we do have an alternative available (corn syrup) so the loss wouldn't be as big.
1. Maintain a 6 months (or whatever time is necessary to restart production) stockpile
2. Have a highly credible policy that, if any foreign country actively opposes free trade of anything important, an ICBM loaded with a nuclear warhead is launched on their main government building or biggest city
3. Change things so that there is no advantage to producing abroad, if possible (e.g. allow unlimited immigration, remove taxation, remove minimum wages, remove regulations, etc.)
1. Maintain a 6 months (or whatever time is necessary to restart production) stockpile
2. Have a highly credible policy that, if any foreign country actively opposes free trade of anything important, an ICBM loaded with a nuclear warhead is launched on their main government building or biggest city
3. Change things so that there is no advantage to producing abroad, if possible (e.g. allow unlimited immigration, remove taxation, remove minimum wages, remove regulations, etc.)
So stockpile it. Just buy 6-month's supply of cheap foreign steel and store it in a warehouse somewhere. Now if things turn south we just draw down the "strategic steel reserve" for a while - we have 6 months to either reclaim our prior ability or find another trading partner willing to sell to us.
Thought experiment: if the key to saving our civilization was on the moon, how long would it take us to redevelop the technology and infrastructure to get back there?
So let's flesh that out a little. Suppose steel costs $2/unit from a US firm, but costs $1/unit on the world market. We can go to companies in various other countries and pay some nominal fee (say, $50k/year) to buy an OPTION to buy their future steel output, not at the current price, but at twice the world price. So in the best case scenario there's no war, the steel company gets paid a nominal fee for an annual option that never gets exercised, and the US military saves far more by buying low cost steel through the years than the cost of the options. But if there ever is a war, we execute the option and get to buy (on 6 month's notice) that factory's full capacity at a 100% markup, crowding out whoever else they would otherwise have sold that steel to at a much lower price. So in wartime we pay foreign companies exactly what we would have had to pay a US firm - twice the world market rate - without first having to wait to build any US factories!
The foreign firm just has to allow for this in their contracts - that they reserve the right to cut off any buyer (paying a suitable penalty fee) with 6 month's notice. Now our stored 6-month supply is exactly enough to tide us over until options can reasonably be exercised (and penalty fees paid) that provide us with substitute sources.
We sign those sort of contracts with firms in a variety of countries in a variety of geographic locations. Unless our primary low-cost supplier gets mad at us and ALL those "safety" countries also get mad at us at the same time, we have an adequate safety margin.
All our steel - heck, all our ships - gets made for HALF the current cost until such time as there actually IS a war with our main supplier, whereupon it all gets made for exactly the price it would have cost to make domestically, had we kept that industry around.
In the middle of a war with China or Taiwan, a foreign company in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, or Canada is unlikely to consider us "the enemy", so they'll have no trouble selling us all the steel they can make at the inflated prices we're willing to pay. The contract and the higher-than-normal price it specifies, should suffice to compensate them for inconveniencing their normal customers, foreign or domestic.
(Are you expecting China to declare war on us and bomb every country in the world that we do business with? That seems like a pretty expensive and unlikely proposition. It's also worth noting that international trade all by itself tends to improve communications and reduce the potential for hostilities.)
You mean they might do what Australia did to Japan in 1938, and the US copied in 1940? If it comes to that, we'll all have bigger problems.
Whenever we "protect" one industry, that has negative downstream effects on all our other industries that depend on it.
In the case of steel, the fact that we protected steel manufacturers made our own auto manufacturers much less internationally competitive than they would otherwise have been, because US automakers were paying twice as much for their steel as companies in Japan and Taiwan were paying for theirs. Similarly, the US nearly killed Apple Computer at one point when it tried to "protect" the domestic semiconductor industry, making locally-assembled macs artificially more expensive than foreign-assembled clones due to the artificially-inflated price of imported DRAM chips.
The best way to "retain a meaningful industrial base" is let our companies compete on the world market.
We can get away with this inside a country, because governments monopolize the use of force, and so you can talk about "free" markets in terms of interactions between people in terms of market transactions, without factoring into the equation the possibility of use of force.
But as between countries, that fiction fails. Countries are in the state of nature. In that state, force is as valid an interaction as trade. Any discussion of the interactions between countries, therefore, must consider how force affects any trade dynamic between the countries.
So why do we keep a domestic steel and arms industry, even though it might be more efficient in terms of global GDP to let some other country manufacture those things? Because it's a huge disadvantage in terms of waging war to have your arms manufacturing done by some other country. We would have a hard time bombing China if our bomber aircraft were manufactured there...
You say that like it would a bad thing if we "had a hard time" bombing specific other countries. :-)
I know a supranational fanatical religious terrorist organisation that happens to agree with you.
So perhaps in light of this it might be a good idea being practical to get used to that fact and stop acting like endless bullying war is a realistic long term foreign policy?
On top of that, it's not actual 'bombing' that you use most of the time to do that, but the 'ability to bomb'. Nobody actually has to get blown up.
No, the idea that a "free market" would lead to a perfect society with perfectly efficient allocation of resources depends on that fiction. It's still quite possible to prefer a free market while still acknowledging the inevitability of market failures. Remember, governments inefficiently allocate resources too, for many of the same reasons as do markets.
Why, exactly, wouldn't that be okay? We'd only lose "all" domestic production if foreign production were quite a lot cheaper, in which case the benefit from switching is huge and ongoing. If you're worried about wartime security, here are three ways to mitigate that concern:
(1) Stockpile. Order enough (cheaper, now that it's imported) steel in advance that we'd be able to meet likely short-term needs.
(2) Diversify. Keep an eye on the foreign supply and make sure that we're at least perserving the option to buy from more than one country so if one trading partner gets angry we can just switch to buying from another.
(3) Be polite. Stop invading and/or bossing around every other country on the planet, so our trading partners aren't likely to have good reason to want to embargo trade with us.
The fact that more international trade would mean we might have to actually care what other countries think is a pretty huge argument in favor of it.
You have to consider the taste, it tastes nicer because fructose has only 5 carbon in it's ring instead of 6 which leads to more pleasurable experience as it makes it fit better into the sweetness sensing in the mouth[1]
With Corn Syrup you get both glucose and fructose together whereas with sugar you just get sucrose. Another reason would be that more corn is grown in the US than sugar cane which makes it more efficient to produce corn syrup instead.
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23537367
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Metabolism_of_sucrose
In practice, nobody is bothered by very slightly different taste. Coca Cola uses different sweeteners (including artificial ones) in different parts of world and mostly nobody notices.
More sweetness doesn't always taste well.
That's largely acquired.
I grew up without HFCS and I think old-timey sugar tastes better.
The subsidies are such that a cattle farmer can actually make a profit buy growing corn, selling it (with subsidies), then buying corn back to feed their own livestock.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/
I fail to see how this is enlightening, of course growing corn creates a profit. If you are excluding the base profit of the corn, why wouldn't a subsidized market create additional profit?
The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not which sugar is being used.
HFCS alarmism probably works to the advantage of junk food companies, who can simply market equally unhealthful products built on table sugar as a premium alternative.
That's fine, let them try. It would equalize the market among these players and those who are already not using HFCS.
They would now have choice. Why is it the role of government to exclude entrepreneurs from competing?
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/11/survival-strat...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/
Evidence that sugar is addictive in the same way as are narcotics and cancer cells in blood with elevated sugar grow much faster.
Both sugar and corn are heavily subsidized, but sugar AFAIK is subsidized by tariffs (i.e. higher prices for the consumer) and corn by transfers. I have no idea why - probably "biofuels" fiasco has a lot to do with it, but not sure if it is the main cause.
>>> for the government to stop making drastic declarations in nutrition that can lead to these really strange and unexpected consequences.
You mean, the government to stop regulating what we eat and trying to protect us from ourselves? Fat chance.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
People have a fsckin' right to eat unhealthy and who the hell are you to fix prices of their food so that they can't?
That's one thing. Another one is that such schemes are really, pragmatically bad as they make people involved in them make political decisions which protect their unfair advantage at the cost of goals important to the general public. Do you really want people to vote for whomever promises to pass bills giving them most benefits at the cost of others? Well, I know that people sometimes do that anyway, but IMO it shouldn't be encouraged with successful examples lasting for two centuries.
And at last - people are pretty capable of getting what they want. If you make it slightly more expensive, they'll simply pay. More expensive - they'll switch to worse alternatives (HFCS, anyone?). Even more - illegal production. Outright ban - sugar mafia. I mean, the US already tried to "fight alcoholism" some time ago and it almost worked.
"If you make it slightly more expensive, they'll simply pay" does not seem like a statement that comports with economics.
Message boards are fertile grounds for thought experiments.
They do not. Obesity, most especially childhood obesity, puts the sufferer at risk to all kinds of nastiness that doesn't kill you outright but is very expensive to treat. I have the right to keep the morbidly obese out of my wallet.
So on the consumer end, as far as consumers are taxpayers, it would have meant paying for zero support programs instead of two. If you want to go out on a limb, cheaper ethanol leads to cheaper petrol due to a substitution effect, so potentially it would have made all food products marginally cheaper thanks to lower shipping costs.
The linked article is a good one though. It is a funny subject to bring up in the bureaucracy because as economists, we all knew the harm it did, but as bureaucrats, we also knew that the policy wasn't going anywhere.
You mean might improve profits for junk food companies?
You [and everyone else] should watch this if you haven't. Amazing lecture and aligns with what you've said.
But it appears that there's still some particularly negative effects of HFCS relative to more typical sugars, too: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
While I can't really argue against you, partially because you're tptacek and partially because you're not wrong here, it's quite irritating to see somebody have a good conclusion and faulty premises.
Also, stop with the scare quotes.
Also: what scare quotes?
I guess an argument could be made that fast-acting monosaccharides are more problematic for diabetics since their bodies can't deal with spikes easily, but for the rest of us there is really no (scientifically accessible) difference at all. Our food just contains too much readily accessible energy.
http://news.yale.edu/2013/01/04/study-suggests-effect-fructo...
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/88/6/1738S.full
The second article says, in its abstract, "However, when HFCS is compared with sucrose, the more commonly consumed sweetener, such differences are not apparent, and appetite and energy intake do not differ in the short-term. Longer-term studies on connections between HFCS, potential mechanisms, and body weight have not been conducted".
one thing that really bothers me though is that having grown up in germany i have big problems swallowing hfcs. mostly because it tastes dull, and feels very acidic in my throat. i've asked other people from overseas and they reported similar things.
the only thing I could find though is the addition of sulfuric acid. if you have some information on that, i'd be grateful.
If you're diabetic, having fruit juice handy during an insulin reaction is preferable to having a sucrose-based product, IIRC. (I had a family member who was diabetic, although it's been many years since they passed.)
They aren't. The enzyme sucrase is needed to break it down but it cuts through sucrose like a hot knife through butter.
Scientists have already studied this and found sucrose and HFCS have basically equivalent responses in "blood glucose, insulin, leptin, ghrelin, and appetite."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17234503
http://examine.com/faq/is-hfcs-high-fructose-corn-syrup-wors...
Actually, table sugar is sucrose, a different compound to fructose. Fructose absorption is actually faster in 1:1 fructose:glucose mixes.
So there are differences in the metabolism of fructose in the two situations, even if minor, and as a general point of chemistry it's not really correct to say that table sugar is half sucrose any more than it's correct to say alcohol is half methane.
But in general yes, HFCS as a substance is not the problem. HFCS as a subsidized foodstuff that gets wedged into too many things, that's the issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose
It's also far from the first thing that happens during the digestive process, as it takes place in the duodenum. If you ate a 1:1 mixture of glucose/fructose they would be present higher up the digestive system. Fructose also absorbs faster in the 1:1 proportion than in other proportions.
I'm not saying Sucrose Good/HFCS Bad (could be the other ay around for all I know), just that there are differences.
Why do I have a particular distaste for HFCS? I remember a time when Americans would come to Canada and say, "where are all your fat people?" Our local newspapers would run stories about how Americans perceive our "indulgent" culture. You don't see those stories anymore. Now we're toe-to-toe in (childhood) obesity, diabetes. Data shows that the US started to use HFCS in liquids and baked goods as early as the 1970s. Canada on the other hand, HFCS has only recently become a regular ingredient in food. I know this is anecdotal and not in anyway scientific, but I have to wonder what other trend could have caused increases in caloric consumption at this magnitude. My understanding is that cane sugar is processed by every cell in your body and HFCS is processed by only your liver. The liver allegedly becomes overworked. If true, this domino effect has grave consequences.
To your correlation/causation point, why don't you think that this is the result of having massive, inexpensive, and domestic sources of a molecule that makes the human brain want to eat more? Rather than some minor distinction in the ratio of the monosaccharides its composed of?
Sugar is basically a drug with immediate gratification with only longer-term side effects to the health. Unless there are laws, companies that put the most of it in their products will 1) make more money because it's cheap and 2) sell more product. I don't know what happened in Canada, but I would guess either those interested in profiting even at the expense of public health either out-competed more ethical competitors or were able to weaken public health laws. Who knows, maybe the US public was the first target, and they went to the north only after our pancreases/adipose tissues were completely saturated...
No, its not. Sucrose is a molecule. Fructose is a different molecule. Glucose is another different molecule.
> Like everyone else has noted, 1 sucrose molecule = 1 glucose + 1 sucrose.
You mean 1 sucrose molecule is broken down at the first stage of its metabolism into 1 glucose and 1 fructose, rather than sucrose being an infinitely recursive combination of 1 glucose + 1 sucrose.
> The proportion of glucose to fructos is just slightly different in HFCS vs table sugar (55/42 or 42/53, versus 50/50).
Yes, the proportion of fructose to glucose in HFCS is higher than than the fixed 1:1 ratio that sucrose is broken down into (the exact amount varies, because HFCS isn't a fixed ratio). Since fructose and glucose have different effects (one notable difference is that there is at least some indication that fructose doesn't trigger the body's mechanisms for satiety while glucose does), this can be significant.
Outside of that, your point is totally valid. The location in the body where the enzymes that break the glycosidic linkage means that the absorbtion curve is different. But I was not addressing that point. Just that the body doesn't break them down differently, after they sucrose molecule is split in the small intestines.
The point isn't that HFCS is good for you --- it isn't --- but that a flight to "natural" sugars isn't a good response. The problem is hyperpalatable foods and (even moreso) liquid calories, not which sugar is being used.
You can't look at the percentage difference of fructose and conclude that HFCS is not much different than regular sugar.
The reason HFCS is so terrible is because it is chemically different. As opposed to table sugar, where the sucrose, glucose and fructose are chemically bound, in HFCS the gluctose and fructose are unbound. What this means is that HFCS is digested much more quickly, often before the body can signal the brain that it is full.
They found the actual ratio varied from 47-65%, with the mean amount being 59%, and the amount in several major brands was 65%.
The fructose ratio in HFCS is not regulated or reported, so you could be drinking anything. With a mean of 59% a 9% difference to table sugar is a big difference, and many popular brands have a 15% difference.
According to the study, the difference between HFCS and sugar is not a myth.
The other advantage that sugar has over HFCS has nothing to do with the chemical composition. It's more expensive.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/oby.2011.4/full
---
Honestly, the amount of sugar/HFCS in various products in the US is absolutely insane. Hell, I pay a premium to buy whole natural peanut butter compared to Jif or the other crap which all contain sugar.
These days I spend more time looking at labels trying to find out what crap is in my food that shouldn't be there, chemicals, sugars, all kinds of salts, and preservatives. Ugh.
[Seriously, the stuff is like candy paste. Although I grew up eating American mass-market peanut butter, I can't stomach the Japanese stuff; even in a sandwich with something sweet like jam/jelly, it just tastes wrong...]
1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...
When I drink a soda made with cane sugar, I am satisfied: I've had a nice little sugar rush, I'm happy, now I want to get on with whatever else I want to do.
When I drink a soda made with HFCS, I am teased: my body has been reminded how tasty something made with cane sugar is, and I'd really like to have something. Oh hey here's that half-drunk 2-litre of Coke, guess I'll have some more of that. Repeat.
Now that I've realized this difference, I buy and drink a hell of a less soda. And am much more happier when I drink what I do.
(This is of course in the middle of various other changes - it's after switching to diet soda for a while, and completely kicking the habit for a few years.)
Both are victims of price fixing through government subsidies. It doesn't matter if you don't contribute to the purchase of the product, as your tax dollars already fund its creation.
An interesting point in the article: "Coke suppressed demand for cane sugar formula because it would cost more to produce and consumers would not pay the extra cost."
"sugar is an indispensable part of everyday life."
"The US sugar industry is almost as important to our economic vitality as is a steady supply of affordable energy. "
They could at least come up with some reasons that don't insult our intelligence.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia
I can be completely fine, eat something sweetened with Stevia and about an hour or two later my muscles will start aching. It is worst in my shoulders :-(.
This is just my experience, maybe I'm weird.
OTOH the more things have HFCS the fewer sugary products I eat, which is good for my health. Wouldn't work if everybody did that, of course.
Why are people discussing what the article specifically says it is not about?
I guess we should also toss soil erosion into the mix. Productive topsoil is a finite resource, and modern agriculture -- while it has improved somewhat, recently -- is expensive in this regard.