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.

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.

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.

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.

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