High Fructose Corn Syrup: A Revolution in the Making (Part II): 'Is there more to MFCS than meets the eye?'

摘要

Last month I discussed how using High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) revolutionized one of the most labor intensive and messy jobs in beekeeping, mixing and providing food to bees. One of the reasons for this is that HFCS is less expensive than honey andoften sugar cane as well. This certainly is true if one factors in the costs of mixing by hand cane sugar and water to make sugar syrup. The low cost is only true, however, because of the vast scale of the highly subsidized corn-producing industry, and new technological advances to process the corn's starch (complex sugars) into its simpler sugars like fructose and glucose (dextrose) as I discussed last month. The driving force to reduce manufacturing costs of HFCS continues to be use of the material inthe human food chain. A few years ago, research showed that diets high in fats and a substance called "cholesterol" were found to be responsible for a condition called atherosclerosis, clogging and the arteries leading to heart attacks and strokes. A landmark work in this area, the Framingham Study, revolutionized how physicians looked at fat and cholesterol in the diet.