Is High Fructose Corn Syrup Just Sugar? Part II

In my last post on High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) I wrote about how the Corn Refiners want to change the name of HFCS to Corn Sugar.  I suggested that this was not such a big deal, because the main problem, in terms of diet, with both HFCS and "real sugar" is that they both provide the same number of "empty" calories.  Weight gain is the result of an imbalance of energy intake and expenditure, in that you take in more calories than you use.  Americans get about 25% of their calories from sugar and everyone should make an attempt to eat less sugar, no matter what its source.  It is important to keep this in mind and realize that even in comparison to HFCS "real sugar" is not a health food.  So in the answer to the title of the previous post (Is HFCS just sugar?), I said Yes, minus the greater impact on the environment.

That being said, I would now revise my answer in light of recent news to Maybe. 

In the November 2010 edition of the journal Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior, Bocarsly and colleagues published a study that compares rats fed a diet with access to either 8% HFCS + Feed Pellets, 10% sucrose + Feed Pellets, or Feed Pellets only.  They found that when rats were allowed free access to the above diets, the animals in the 8% HFCS group gained more weight, over the course of 6 months, than rats in the other diet groups, despite taking in the same total number of calories. This data suggests that HFCS may have greater potential to lead to obesity than sugar despite the fact that they have the same number of calories.  The authors suggest that this may be the case, because fructose is metabolized by the body in such a way that it may promote weight gain.  However it is important to note that sucrose or "real sugar" is made up of glucose and fructose as well, but HFCS has about 5% more fructose than sucrose does.  Whether this is a clinically relevant difference is debatable, but as this study suggests in may be.

Also note that this study did have some limitations. First, the number of animals in each group was relatively small.  Also there were some inconsistencies with the results.  Investigators did not find that when rats had access to 8% HFCS for only 12 hours a day that they gained more weight than control animals in the long term (6 months), while in the short term (2 months) they found rats with 12 hour access to 8% HFCS gained more weight than rats with 24 hour access.

In another recent study published in the journal Obesity, where the researchers analyzed the fructose content of a large number of ccommercially available HFCS sweetened beverages they found that the fructose to glucose ratio in these beverages is almost always more than 55% fructose and in some cases up to 65% fructose.  Taking this data with the findings and possible mechanism in the above study it does seem that foods with HFCS may in fact be worse for health than foods with "real sugar".  Remember though that "real sugar" isn't really healthy either.