Dr. Bach is not only the creator of the Superfood Mix (www.SuperfoodMix.com) I have grown to love and add to my daily diet, but he is also a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, a Naturopathic Doctor, a Doctor of Philosophy, and I’m not quite sure what LC means, but I assume it’s something beneficial! haha!
As I speak with him often, and consider him a friend, I asked him if he would do me a personal favor and write an article on how dangerous High Fructose Corn Syrup and Refined Sugars are…so here it is! The truth! I was going to take little pieces of the article, but I think the information is so important, I’ve decided to use the entire thing.
What Parents and Kids Need to Know About
High Fructose Corn Syrup and Refined Sugars in General
Dr. Bach MacCloud, DO, ND, PhD, LC
Parents (and the general public) are constantly bombarded by “reports” telling us about the latest health scares. Although some of them are certainly legitimate, most are more about sensationalizing poorly designed, mostly inconclusive studies to get people’s attention. Sorry, but that’s just the nature of how most of today’s news and information is presented.
Kids, on the other hand, are constantly bombarded by advertisements for “kid-friendly” foods and beverages in the hopes that they’ll influence their parent’s buying decisions (which they certainly do). From my perspective, 90+% of all those ads are for foods & beverages of either poor or dubious nutritional value. Once again, I’m sorry to say that that’s just the nature of today’s food production & marketing practices.
This article is meant to present the key points regarding HFCS in our food supply in a straight-forward, reasonably objective fashion to help both parents and kids to understand what it is, what impact it may be having on one’s health, and help them decide whether to consume or avoid it.
I believe in freedom of choice based upon accurate information. This is not about preaching my beliefs, it is about informing and empowering parents and kids to take charge of their own health.
High fructose corn syrup has gotten a lot of attention over the past several years. It has, in many ways, become the latest scapegoat to blame many of our health problems on. I’m not really sure that this is completely deserved, but I agree that it is a significant contributor.
Numerous studies have shown a strong correlation between the rise in the intake of HFCS and the increase of several serious health issues including:
- Overweight
- Obesity
- Insulin Resistance / Metabolic Syndrome
- Diabetes
- High Blood Pressure / Hypertension
- Abnormal Blood Lipids (elevated cholesterol, LDL, & triglycerides)
- Coronary Artery Disease
- Accelerated aging (associated with advanced glycosylation end products)
- Diabetic complications (including: retinopathy (may lead to blindness), nephropathy (may lead to severe kidney disease), neuropathy (may contribute to numbness, pain, impotence, speech impairment, loss of bladder control)
- Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
- Elevated uric acid levels (gout, kidney stones)
Now, to be fair and objective, it is vital to point out that “correlation does not equal causation.” In other words, the rise in intake of HFCS over the past several decades is not the only possible cause for the declining health of both children and adults in our society. There has also been a steady, dramatic rise in the intake of sugars, artificial sweeteners, processed oils & fats, food additives, toxins and many other very questionable substances & things (like electromagnetic radiation exposure) not to mention a decline in exercise & activity along with the erosion of many core values and the family unit. All of these likely play significant roles in our declining health.
As far as the role HFCS has played, the HFCS industry has struck back with a big advertising campaign stating that their “experts” report that HFCS is no different than any other sugar… yada, yada, yada.
The truth, in my opinion, is that HFCS is extremely harmful. On the other hand, there is also truth to what the HFCS industry experts are quoted as saying as well… HFCS is not significantly different or more harmful that other form of highly refined sugar. The reality is that all highly refined sugars are harmful. The same is true of all artificial sweeteners as well.
We are all programmed to enjoy and seek out sweet tasting foods. That was part of what helped people identify foods that contain significant amounts of carbohydrates which are essential for overall health and energy. Carbohydrates are the body’s preferred source of energy in many situations.
In nature, however, carbohydrates almost never occur by themselves, rather they are part of a more complex food matrix that typically includes quite a bit of fiber, small amounts of protein, and in some cases a bit of fat as well. In addition, they mainly occur in fruits and vegetables which also contain a variety of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and enzymes (all of which play a role in the proper digestion & utilization of the sugars and other nutrients).
Even sugar cane, beets, and corn (the three primary crops that refined sugars are derived from) are not very concentrated sources of sugar. However, once they go through multiple steps of refinement, their sugar concentration goes from 4-7% up to 95-100%. They no longer resemble the original food crops at all after this transformation, and the body is no longer able to recognize and use them as food. Rather, they have been transformed into highly-refined chemicals that behave entirely differently in the body.
You can eat all the whole sugar cane you want and it will not have a significant adverse affect on your blood sugar or your health (other than contributing to dental decay since the sugar still feeds the harmful bacteria that cause tooth and gum disease). However, when 96% of the other substances are stripped away from the sugar cane, leaving only the sucrose, it will cause significant dramatic upset to one’s metabolism.
So, the point is simply this: ALL REFINED SUGAR IS HARMFUL! HFCS is a highly refined sugar and it is harmful.
The next issue to clarify is whether HFCS is actually the same as other refined sugars or if there is something even more harmful about it. Regular sucrose is a crystallized compound composed of 50% glucose and 50% fructose bound together chemically. The body has to break this chemical bond during the digestive process.
Corn syrup is a composed of a syrupy / liquefied version of sugar that is derived from corn that has been treated with enzymes to digest / break the chemical bond between the glucose and fructose. That’s why it is a syrup rather than a crystal. As with sugar, it is made up of 50% glucose and 50% fructose. So, the body doesn’t have to break any chemical bonds to digest it. This may or may not be significant, the jury is still out on that… however, I’d venture to guess that it does make a difference (especially considering the amount of HFCS being consumed).
HFCS is simply a blend of corn syrup with more fructose than glucose (typically 55% fructose and 45% glucose. The primary reason for this is that our taste buds recognize fructose as tasting sweeter than glucose. The big food companies are well aware of this as well as the fact that most everyone loves sweet tasting things. So, they add sugar and/or HFCS (that is cheaper and tastes even sweeter than sugar or regular corn syrup) to everything imaginable. That, in and of itself, really wouldn’t create a health problem. The problem has to do with the fact that we buy all those things that they’ve added all that sugar & HFCS to and eat it!
Fructose tastes sweeter than glucose. By modifying corn syrup to have a higher percentage of fructose, the food manufacturers are able to make their products taste sweeter at a lower cost which makes people like and crave the foods it is added to. Of course that leads to more sales and higher profits which has absolutely nothing to do with health or nutrition.
I should say a bit more about fructose which has also gotten a black eye by association with HFCS. Fructose is typically considered to be “fruit sugar” but that is not entirely correct. Fructose is a highly refined form of a naturally occurring simple sugar (monosaccharide) that primarily occurs in fruits. The name for it in its natural form is levulose. While levulose is fine when consumed as naturally occurring fruit sugar in whole fruits, once it has been refined into fructose, this is no longer the case.
Think of it this way; just as sucrose it the highly refined form of the naturally occurring sugar from sugar cane, beets, or other starchy plants, fructose is the highly refined form of the naturally occurring sugar from fruit (levulose). In their more natural whole food forms they are well recognized and metabolized by the body, but in their highly refined / processed forms they are treated more like drugs than as nutrients. Both are actually quite healthy when consumed in small amounts the way they naturally occur fruits & vegetables; when consumed as drugs, not so much.
The problem with most sweeteners occurs when they are refined and added to foods in large amounts. Their inherent food value and properties have been entirely changed yet they are presented (via advertising and other forms of misinformation) as being comparable to the original substance, they are not.
Another very interesting thing about fructose has to do with its property of being given a high priority for processing & metabolism by the liver during the digestive process. So, when it is taken in large amounts, this priority status causes it to overwhelm the liver’s metabolic pathways to the detriment of other processes and the liver itself. When consumed as nature intended, there is no such problem. Fructose is more rapidly metabolized in the liver than glucose. This can flood metabolic pathways leading to increased triglyceride synthesis and fat storage in the liver thereby causing a rise in serum triglycerides, promoting an atherogenic lipid profile and elevating cardiovascular risk. Increased fat storage in the liver may lead to an increased incidence in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and this is one of several links between HFCS consumption and obesity as well as the metabolic syndrome.
The last thing I’d like to touch upon is the underlying mechanism that makes all refined sweeteners harmful. This applies to all refined sweeteners with significant effects on blood sugar &/or insulin levels. This gets a tad bit complex so if you don’t totally follow it please excuse me. It really needs quite a bit longer explanation than I have room for here.
Concentrated sweeteners, that significantly elevate blood sugar levels, (anything above 100 in my opinion) leads to a physiological disruption of homeostasis (the balanced relationship between all the body’s thousands of metabolic reactions) via both a direct and indirect stress type responses. By disrupting blood sugar (first dramatically elevating it and then having it drop via the body’s counter-regulatory response) there is a linked / interdependent disruption of the body’s “mineral relationships.” The proper mineral relationships are essential to the 3,000+ enzymatic reactions that take place in our bodies on a continuous basis. When blood sugar is out of balance, all the mineral relationships are out of balance, this causes major disruptions in all of the body’s enzyme systems, which, in turn, disrupts the function and efficiency of every single cell in the body.
Summary & Conclusions:
I’m a bottom line kind of guy. I don’t always remember all the details about all the decisions & choices I make, but I do like to take the time to think things through and come to a decision regarding various issues at least initially. My take on the whole “refined sugar and HFCS” issue is very simple and hopefully the above explanation helps to make it simple for you as well.
My simple conclusions are as follows:
- Refined sugars, including HFCS are not healthy, in fact, they are extremely harmful.
- Generally speaking, it is healthiest to consume a food as close to the way it occurs in nature as possible.
- The more refined a food is, the less healthy it is.
- There are several exceptions to conclusion # 2 & 3 that I can think of but none that I can think of to #1.
One last related point: “Agave Nectar,” from all that I can tell (and I’m always open to being proven wrong) is a very harmful, highly refined sweetener that is being totally misrepresented as a healthier alternative. It is actually more appropriately named “Really High Fructose Agave Syrup” because that’s what it is. It has up to 80-90% fructose and was never previously used by any group in this form.
