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Stealth Calories
by Sally Squires
The Washington Post
February 6, 2007
Pick up a processed food item these days -- from bread and cereal to salad dressings, soft drinks and soups -- and you're likely to find a common ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup.
Call it the stealth sugar, because although foodmakers must list it as an ingredient, they are not required to say how much of it a product contains.
"Why is high-fructose corn syrup showing up in my food?" Lean Plate Club members often ask me. Some are so put off by the presence of this sweetener that they search for commercial products without it or make their own alternatives.
"I have been using the Wish-Bone spray-on" salad dressing, a Lean Plate Club member wrote during a recent Web chat. This person appreciated the convenience of the spray but didn't want the added sugar it contains. "Is there a recipe somewhere for homemade salad dressing that you can put in a spray-on bottle?" this LPCer asked.
High-fructose corn syrup is the floozy of the sugar world: It's sweeter and cheaper than table sugar but is viewed with distrust by some consumers. As a liquid, it's easy for food and beverage makers to use, especially for sweetening drinks. No wonder it has edged out the former leading sweetener: sucrose, or ordinary table sugar.
Since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup in 1966, U.S. consumption has reached about 60 pounds per person per year. That rise has closely paralleled the obesity epidemic -- a fact that has led some scientists to suggest that there might be a link between the two.
Some aren't so sure. Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a vocal critic of non-diet soft drinks, doesn't see high-fructose corn syrup as a particular evil. As far as he is concerned, it makes no difference whether beverages or foods are sweetened with table sugar or high-fructose corn syrup: He says both ingredients contribute plenty of added sugar and calories.
Now, new findings may help settle the debate.
First, a little Sugar 101. Made from corn starch, high-fructose corn syrup is a thick liquid that contains two basic sugar building blocks -- fructose and glucose -- in roughly equal amounts. Sucrose, familiar to consumers as table sugar, is a larger molecule that breaks down into glucose and fructose in the intestine during metabolism.
To read more about avoiding excess calories from sugar, click the article link above.
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