Jun 8 2009

HFCS-free sales booming

Thanks to Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, for alerting me to the current HFCS-free sales boom.  HFCS, of course, is High Fructose Corn Syrup, the liquid sweetener made from corn (see previous posts).  Food marketers have gotten the message that many people consider HFCS to be the new trans fat, even though it is not much different biologically from common table sugar (sucrose).

HFCS is replaced easily by sucrose, which used to be much more expensive.  Now, because of the use of corn for ethanol, sucrose is only slightly more expensive than HFCS.

Click on the Table to see the overall 13% growth in sales over the last year, with products like HFCS-free milk drinks, juices, salad dressings, and teas registering 1,500% to 16,000% increases.  Like “trans fat-free,” the term “HFCS-free”  is a calorie distractor.  It too will make you forget about the calories.

The irony is that white table sugar – formerly a leading target of “eat less” messages – suddenly has a health aura.  Marketers have wasted no time moving in to use that aura to sell the same old products.

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  • Kat
  • June 8, 2009
  • 6:26 pm

Um, what are “milk drinks”?

Seems like anyone buying something that has to be qualified like that wouldn’t care about HFCS in the first place.

  • Anthro
  • June 8, 2009
  • 8:01 pm

Kat: I guess chocolate milk would be a “milk drink” (?) There are also a bunch of “yogurty” type “drinks” in the dairy case I’ve noticed. Just as silly as fruity yogurts (all of which have added sugars of one type or another).

As to the post, I have been avoiding HFCS for a long time now, mostly for political reasons. I have wondered if there is anything to the belly fat hypothesis that claims that HFCS is somehow responsible for that epidemic? Also, who is using all the ethanol that is being made in place of growing other grains? I live in Wisconsin and we have had 15% ethanol in our gas for years, but we still have the same percentage although the price of flour has more than doubled.

  • Jon
  • June 8, 2009
  • 8:43 pm

Kat: I think it refers to lattes, flavored milk, kefir, smoothies, milkshakes, and yogurt drinks like DanActive.

Anthro: HFCS is just one carbohydrate. All carbohydrates (and fats, proteins and alcohol) have calories. Sugars (including HFCS), white rice, skinless potatoes, and white flour have minimal nutritional value other than their calories. Similarly, partially hydrogenated oils have minimal nutritional value. I never buy anything with partially hydrogenated oils, and I mostly cook at home, so there’s minimal HFCS in my diet.

Also, outside the Midwest, EtOH gas was rarer until recently.

  • Helen
  • June 8, 2009
  • 9:55 pm

Today I read a breakfast cereal label that listed “organic evaporated cane juice crystals” as one of its ingredients. Seriously.

[...] sugar as a substitute. Probably best just to skip refined sweets altogether. (See next post.) Marion Nestle at Food Politics: Thanks to Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, for alerting me to the current HFCS-free sales [...]

I feel so sad for consumers. They are awash in worthless data which is simply “marketing opportunity” for food companies. Everyday the list grows longer as the consumer jumps from one trend to the next.
Sugar and corn syrup are the same thing and the real issue is the amount needed in any given recipe to make the consumer happy. Trading one for the other does no good and ultimately the consumer will pay the price for not understanding the difference.

[...] This post was Twitted by SlowFoodMadera – Real-url.org [...]

I have two bread loaf wrappers in my desk drawer from a brand my spouse and I used to buy. (Switched because we wanted a more solid bread) They are identical in every respect, except one proclaims that it is “HFCS FREE!!” Take a look at the ingredients and it was just replaced with sucrose, and in the nutrition facts, it is identical to the decimal point.

The anti-HFCS effort has really lost sight of the bigger picture – people need to pay attention to the total amount of simple sugars they consume, whether it comes from organic evaporated cane juice, HFCS, honey, maple syrup, or concentrated fruit juices. By making HFCS “The New White Sugar” it is making yet another distraction from the information that people have had all along – on the Nutrition Facts label.

I wonder, if you are reading this, Marion Nestle, you know Michael Pollan, and in In Defense of Food he singularly advocates that people avoid HFCS. Wouldn’t this be contributing to the problem, and have you spoken to him about it? Ironically, in a book where he complains about useless hyphenated labels popping up like daisies, in just one year one fifth of his food rules may be helping to proliferate one more troublesome label.

Thanks for writing about sugar from a sane, nutrition and science-based perspective. The world needs more people like you who base their opinions on food on what it is and what it does.

  • Chad
  • July 8, 2009
  • 10:40 am

It is true that the caloric content of the same amount of sucrose and HFCS are comparable. To me, it just seems so unnatural.

I try not to buy things with HFCS for two reasons. 1) This country is destroying the environment by growing so much corn without crop rotation, requiring the use of too much fertilizer and pesticides. 2) Some studies have shown problems with HFCS (including high mercury levels) and the studies on sweetsurpise.com are very short-term 2 day experiments, which do not provide any significant data (in my opinion).

Regardless of the type of sweetener, we just need to eat less of it.

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