Florida. Eighty-five degrees at 8 o’clock in the morning. Coastal breezes cool the air, blowing light around the palm trees and gorgeously tinted hibiscus, but the heat is a constant. Down there, everyone drank Coca Cola or its variant, Pepsi, even people who drank more elegant things at night. A cold drink with a buzz; in the subtropics you couldn’t live without it.
Growing up in Florida, I developed a mild addiction to Coke that’s never left me. But during the last couple of decades I noticed a dismaying difference in the drink’s taste. Was the flavor of Coke becoming treacly? Spasmodically I switched from Coke to Pepsi and back, trying to rediscover the flavor I remembered, but it eluded me.
A chance remark by a friend helped me finger a likely culprit: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). I began reading the labels on juice jars, then on other foods; the stuff was everywhere, in baked goods, sauces, you name it. The crystalline cane sugar that was almost the only sugar when I was a child (living, by the way, hardly more than 100 miles from cane-rich Cuba and less than 100 miles from a cane sugar mill in Clewiston) had long since been replaced by corn syrup in vast numbers of products.
Corn syrup, it seemed, had all the food processing companies in its sticky grip.
Politics had had a hand in things as well, since after 1960 cane sugar was shadowed by association with the bearded communist who ran in the beautiful island south of the Keys, while HFCS was heartland stuff, helping the American farm stay viable.
Meanwhile, between the ’70s and the millennium, large numbers of people gained weight and diabetes became an epidemic. Our own food seemed to have become a public health threat, though the issue wasn’t simple: food was also taking the rap for the decrease in physical movement that had set in as people walked less and did less physical work.
Still, it was clear that Americans were downing more food spiked with sweeteners. Last year a Tufts study found that “[t]he annual per-capita consumption of caloric sweeteners has increased by 40 pounds in the last 40 years, and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) accounts for 81 percent of the 83 additional calories the average American consumes each day from sweeteners alone.”
By now HFCS is under so much unfriendly scrutiny that its makers are trying the tired old trick of changing its name. From an increasingly vocal foodie preference for cane sugar on grounds of taste to health studies touching on whether HFCS makes people fatter than cane sugar (or beet sugar, which we have, though it’s better known in Europe), bad PR is pushing HFCS producers to rechristen it “corn sugar.” Oops! That name is already taken by other sugars like dextrose—but throw it at HFCS, give it enough ballyhoo, and it could probably stick. What wouldn’t stick to HFCS?
There’s been nothing sweet about the fight between HFCS critics and the industry. Critics say that the cloying syrup is responsible for the explosion of obesity and diabetes and that the genetically manipulated corn it’s made from adds to its dangers. The industry piles up studies of its own to prove that HFCS is no more fattening or dangerous than cane sugar or honey.
Earlier this year, however, information that may be the most decisive yet came from Princeton. In experiments supported by the U.S. Public Health Service, researchers there found that rats eating food rich in HFCS gained 48 percent more weight than rats eating only rat chow. They also had higher triglycerides and beer bellies.
“Male rats in particular ballooned in size,” the researchers reported, noting that weight gain may be accelerated because the sugar in HFCS is absorbed into the system immediately, while that in cane sugar is metabolized in a more complex way.
Of course, the final point to be made about HFCS is that no form of sugar is totally to blame for our current practice of eating too much sweetened food, and too much food, period. The touchstone for sweetness should be fruit—where truly natural, unprocessed sugars coexist with vitamins and fiber—not candy, pastry, sugary cereals or super-sweet juices.
