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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2559 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

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Why is high-fructose corn syrup bad (compared to cane sugar)? If it's not bad, why do people think that it's bad?

It’s not just the chemical structure that makes it bad, it’s the corn lobby. The price of corn syrup is driven down by government farmer subsidies. You can put massive amounts of corn syrup in everything at a scale that wouldn’t be affordable with cane sugar.

There's a (likely just-so) hypothesis they teach you in undergrad biochemistry, or at least there was many years ago. The first enzyme in the catabolism of glucose, phosphofructokinase, is thought to be a key regulatory step in the pathway - as downstream products build up, flux through the glycolytic pathway is decreased. Fructose has a parallel catabolic pathway that bypasses this regulatory step and thus keeps churning and is more likely to stimulate de novo lipogenesis in the liver (aka getting fat).

I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in this, or how it interacts with CICO. But I think this hypothesis trickles down in an increasingly garbled form to the public and may be a large part of the hostility towards HFCS.

IIRC, the basis for the argument that high fructose corn syrup being worse than cane sugar comes down to fructose needing to be converted to glucose in the liver, as opposed to glucose, which does not. Sucrose is essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose, so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking.

edit: I didn't remember correctly after all. Apologies! Sucrose is a disaccharide, essentially a molecule of fructose and a molecule of glucose bonded together. Enzymes in the mouth partially break down some of the sugar but most of the breakdown occurs in the small intestine, where the glucose and fructose are then absorbed into the bloodstream. High Fructose Corn Syrup contains free monosaccharides that can be immediately absorbed into the bloodstream from the small intestine. Once in the bloodstream, glucose can be directly utilized, assuming the presence of insulin, production of which the free glucose will stimulate. Fructose, OTOH has to be processed by the liver, and doesn't stimulate the production of insulin or enhance the production of leptin. As @sarker has helpfully pointed out in reply, HFCS actually contains similar amounts of glucose and fructose, so the key difference there is that regular sugar still needs to be broken down in the small intestine before it can be metabolized. Rest of original post follows.

Proponents allege that too much HFCS in the diet leads to more visceral fat and even metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The counterargument is that the difference in metabolic pathways is relatively minor, that if caloric sweeteners are that much a part of any diet, metabolic syndrome and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease can result, and that the bigger issue is a diet heavy in processed foods in general.

so the liver only has to do about half of the work, comparatively speaking.

HFCS is usually also about half glucose (by dry weight).

The most common forms of HFCS used for food and beverage manufacturing contain fructose in either 42% ("HFCS 42") or 55% ("HFCS 55") by dry weight, as described in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (21 CFR 184.1866).[5]

HFCS is IIRC pretty darn similar to honey in terms of sugar composition. And if you think fructose is the enemy specifically, there are "healthy, natural" options advertised with higher fructose content.

I ran into this a couple years back reading up on DIY endurance nutrition: the quick, cheap recommendation is usually a mix of maltodextrin (long-chain glucose polymers, used in home brewing fairly often) and something high in fructose (typically agave nectar) because the two metabolic pathways are largely orthogonal. That said, those results are largely applicable to specific circumstances resembling "how many calories can I usefully consume while running in warm weather", not general nutrition advice.

You're right! I had to refresh my own memory on this some more and the additional detail that my brain was fuzzy on in the intervening years is the whole disaccharide vs. monosaccharide bit, meaning that because regular sugar is a disaccharide, the bond between glucose and fructose has to be broken, whereas HFCS contains free monosaccharides. I kinda remembered that sucrose took a bit more work by the body to digest, but I was misattributing that to the balance of sugars, which as you're pointing out, isn't really much different than regular table sugar. So to be clear, it's not the amount of glucose vs. fructose itself, the idea is that the free monosaccharides of fructose in HFCS are uniquely taxing to the liver in a way that regular sugar is not because the bonds on sucrose have to be broken before the fructose in regular sugar can be processed by the liver. That's... even more hair-splitting than I remembered it to be!

A lot of really really unhealthy eating amounts to "not thinking about eating." Just eating whatever.

The moment you start thinking about anything relating to eating, it's a huge upgrade over not thinking.

You can get just as fat off cane sugar as hfcs, but if you refuse to eat hfcs you'll at least reject a few things at the 7-11, and sometimes you won't eat something you would have otherwise eaten.

Sure, but how is that relevant to replacing hfcs with cane sugar in Coca Cola?

It explains why the placebo effect exists? Due to ozempic thé average waistline will assuredly shrink for at least a little while, RfK will have something to claim credit for.

Despite Mexican soda using only cane sugar, it’s the fattest country in the world. I’m skeptical of there being much difference.

It's not, but it explains why someone might empirically think it is. Someone who eliminates hfcs from their diet will likely see various improvements in health.

It's not an infrequent observation that nearly any diet is better than no diet just because you have to start paying attention.

I think mostly it is just cheap, and thus every cheap thing that needs sugar has it in it. Some people say that they can taste the difference but chemically it becomes identical if there is enough water/acid so I doubt the effect is the corn syrup.

Cane sugar tends to generally-but-not-consistently taste better. I'm unconvinced that the health difference isn't just another 'gluten sensitivity'.

Can't speak for the cane sugar, but the gluten sensitivity thing is real from my experience.

Cut out gluten in a desperate attempt to sort out some digestive issues years ago and it helped a lot.

If I eat gluten in moderate quantities nowadays it results, like clockwork, in a headache, brain fog and later indigestion.

So yeah, sample size of one but I'm sold.

I can tell the difference in Sodas. But it's hard to discern how much of that is the aluminum/lining vs glass as opposed to the sugar approach.

Pepsi Throwback (in a can) was better than Pepsi (in a can), but I don't know what else changed in the recipe.

I don't know. When I moved from Europe to the US, taking my 2-liters-of-soda-a-day habit with me, it resulted in a slew of crippling gastric issues which responded well and quickly to (1) forcing myself to not drink soda and/or (2) switching to "Mexican coke". Now, of course, there are more differences in the formulations than the type of sugar used. I am however generally very skeptical towards food sensitivities, so it seems unlikely to me that this was pure nocebo.

Aren’t European soda formulations very, very different? I’d assume it was some dye or something before pointing to the kind of sugar.

And I’ll point out that Mexico is an extremely fat country, despite a good chunk of their population being poor enough to worry about starving to death. The portion sizes probably helped you though.

2-liters-of-soda-a-day

I feel as if I am misreading. That's a lot of soda per day. That's me growing up in the 70s amounts of soda. Quitting or reducing that would substantially improve your insulin sensitivity over time.

I mean there’s definitely people doing that. There’s no shortage of them- either by tonnage or headcount.

Yeah, it was quite a lot - on more productive days I'd easily average more on the order of twice that. I was somehow blessed with a fairly generous metabolism, which allowed me remain slightly underweight through all that and have no problems (in terms of blood sugar levels/functioning) with suddenly going cold turkey, which I believe would suggest that my insulin/glucagon system was fine. Perhaps relatedly, I also used to easily flipflop between eating ridiculous amounts and skipping meals altogether while hyperfocusing on something.

In the end it was simple stomach irritation (enough to cause an intermittent IBS suspicion) from the US variant - and the bad ergonomics of the half-liter glass bottles that mexicoke came in - that got me to drop it (instead replacing it with a more expensive, and painful during withdrawal, coffee habit), and now that I'm back in the EU I have rebounded to maybe 1l/day.

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