HFCS

[forgotten_aria]

I'm getting more and more anecdotal evidence that HFCS make my mood fragile and negative. It's starting to mount high enough with both blind and not blind tests that I think that I'm justified in my personal paranoia of them.

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a very good reason for you to avoid them.

[binkbink.livejournal.com]

Giant Eagle is selling soft drinks made with sugar under their own brand and I am enjoying them. My previous favorite, Coca Cola, is now making me sick. The problem didn't start when they changed to HFCS however. I wonder if the manufacturing process for it has changed.

It took me years to figure out I had problems with sodium citrate because there were two ways to make it and only one kind caused the problem.

I give you credit for researching it.

The taste of ginger ale made with sugar and made with HFCS is pretty much indistinguishable, so you might want to get some bottles and have someone who is not Greg decant it and mark it, then see if Greg sees the difference in mood.

Also, be wary of plastic bottles. Research has found a connection between BPA and interference with brain cell connections vital to memory, learning and mood.

[blackpaladin.livejournal.com]

Also, I don't know how much of a ketchup fan you are, but Heinz has recently released "Simply Heinz," which among other things is made with sugar rather than HFCS. We picked up a bottle recently, as much out of curiosity as the fact that we needed ketchup in the house :), and yum.

Now that the price of corn is going up thanks to demand for ethanol fuels, I believe we'll start seeing more products that currently use HFCS producing real-sugar alternatives, or possibly replacements.

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

In a way that's different from sugar or regular corn syrup?
I'm curious because I get that effect from too much of any kind of refined sugar.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

Yes, from what I can tell. I don't need to watch my sugar intake but even a teaspoon of HFCS seems to have affect on me.

[geekosaur]

Curious. Does natural fructose affect you the same way? Apples, pears, watermelons, most fruit juices, some raisins, and honey. Other fruits have fructose as well, but when there's more glucose than fructose the fructose is more easily metabolized.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

Fruit juices seem fine. I mostly only drink cranraspberry though, 100% juice. I don't consume much honey. I expect the extra fiber when consuming apples tends to compensate somehow.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

But I also suspect we're going to find out that HFCS are getting something weird from the processing or the crap corn it's made from.

From wikipedia, some of the processing involves these other items. I know it's purified, but...

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.

a rat study

[(Anonymous)]

You've heard how people start to need higher and higher doses of some drugs - say, cocaine - to get the same effect ? There was a rat study that divided the rats into two groups. Each got the same number of calories. But the group eating HFCS started to eat more and more, exactly as if there was some dose-dependent effect.

Now we need to repeat the study for a wider variety of foods.