Monday, November 26, 2007

High Fructose Corn Syrup


Is it truly evil? Why? I've been trying to figure this out since I first heard about the potential evil of it. After reading tons of articles, both those slanted ultra-negatively against it and those that sneer at the very thought that anything could be wrong with it. And loads in between. Here's what I've figure out:


The problem isn't exactly "High Fructose Corn Syrup." It's any fructose in high doses. Let me explain the difference.


Fructose is a natural sugar. It's what you get when you eat an apple, for instance. Fructose, unlike most other sugars, must be broken down by the liver before it can be utilized. If you eat an apple's worth of fructose, this isn't a problem. It's a small amount and the liver handles it easily.


High fructose corn syrup contains a massive amount of fructose, comparatively speaking. The equivalent of far more apples than any human would ever eat in a day. The liver can't handle this well. So what does it do? Same thing it does for most things that overwhelm it: It creates and stores fat. Eventually this can lead to fatty liver disease. Some research shows that HFCS can cause a host of other maladies, but this simple fat-storage trigger is enough for me to want to avoid it. My liver has enough work to do processing the wine that I drink and all of the environmental toxins I am exposed to. I don't need to be forcing it to do so much more work when I can easily avoid this stuff.


And that means avoiding all fructose, not just the high fructose corn syrup variety. I'll still eat an occasional apple (and other fruits) with their natural dosage of fructose, but I don't need products that use fructose as the sweetener. My liver doesn't need it.


All other types of sugar are broken down in the stomach and can be absorbed directly by the cells without having to be processed through the liver. Thus, from an athlete's perspective, they are more readily available.


Armed with this knowledge, I went through our stores of myriad sports drinks, gels, blocks, tablets, and wafers that we've picked up at various events over the years. We have piles of this stuff. I swear, we'll never need to actually purchase a sports drink ourselves. That's even with me putting back anything that says 'partially hydrogenated' or 'high fructose' on it.

I was not surprised to find that a fair number of these products on the 'nutrition' shelf in the garage contain fructose. I had sworn off HFCS-containing sports products a long time ago (and there are a lot of them), but I wasn't aware of the trouble with fructose itself until recently. Even my beloved GU contains fructose. Bye, bye, GU.


We only use products that are fructose-free now. Anything made by Clif is a-okay in my book. Rice syrup is the carb and most ingredients are organic. Plus, they are great event sponsors.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting to know.