Did you know that there isn’t any sugar in Coca-Cola in North America? Not a drop. In fact most things which used to be loaded with sugar are now loaded with something much more interesting: High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Carbonated Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Caramel Color, Phosphoric Acid, Natural Flavors, Caffeine.
I first noticed that something was different about soft drinks in Mexico. I seemed to really like an iced cold coke in a bottle, or a whole cooler of sprite as I sat panting in the sun. This was before I began to explore the virtue of Limonada, but back when I was digging the soda pop I assumed that it tasted better because it was bottled in glass.
I don’t really drink much soda, it’s not my thing, but I love a cold coke with my pizza, or a 7up with mexican food. Lately I’ve begun to just give up on soda, assuming that I’m getting old and as I age, naturally the sweet taste of soda turns foul and gross and leaves me slightly nauseous. I was staring unhappily into my can of coke not long ago and wondering why such a cruel deterioration would come over me when my companion asked “When did you fist notice it?” I thought about it a bit and said that Coke really hasn’t been the same for more than ten years. Is it the plastic bottle? Is it the newish, weird looking, metallic cans? It’s probably just that I’m getting older.
“Nope” suggested my companion. Since the early 90’s all the sugar in most foods has been replaced with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS.) Sugar has a bad reputation, and corn syrup is cheap. Not only is it cheap, but baby it’s baaad for you.
To test the theory, I shelled out the extra buck to buy a coke in the bottle, imported from Mexico at my local taqueria. It was a lot better. I sipped my coke from the narrow bottle and made that cool popping noise with my tongue you can only make with glass. It was delicious.
So why is all our food made with HFCS? What the fuck is HFCS? Well, High Fructose Corn Syrup is made by processing corn starch to yield glucose, and then processing the glucose to produce a high percentage of fructose. Basically, white cornstarch is turned into crystal clear syrup. Sounds simple, but the process is actually pretty complicated. Three different enzymes are used to break down the cornstarch, which is composed of chains of glucose molecules of almost infinite length, into the simple sugars glucose and fructose.
Cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called polysaccharides. Alpha-amylase is industrially produced by bacteria. Then an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose. Unlike alpha-amylase, glucoamylase is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat where one would likely see little balls of Aspergillus floating on the top. finally, glucose-isomerase converts glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose with some other sugars mixed in. While alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry, pricey glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it.
There are two more steps involved. First is a liquid chromatography step that takes the mixture to 90 percent fructose. Finally, this is back-blended with the original mixture to yield a final concentration of about 55 percent fructose. That’s what the industry calls high fructose corn syrup.
Ahem. Sounds gross right? Best of all it’s proven to actually promote obesity (which is awesome!) I want that in anything I drink or eat about as much as I want hydrogenated oil, lard, or human fingers. Can we please have our squeezed and strained cain sugar back? and while you’re back there, can we go back to glass bottles please? Wait, no… forget it. I think I’m going to stick with Limonada. Never mind. Enjoy!
Here’s what the Corn Refiners Association have to say about HFCS:
It’s as safe as any common table sweetner
Bill Sanda BS, MBA cites a concerned chiropractor as saying:
The bodies of the children I see today are mush
There’s a lot more. Go find it yourself.
15 Comments
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Thats exactly what me and my roommate found out a few days ago. We were looking up the greatest failure in marketing history which was “New Coke” and right about the time that flopped is when they changed to the HFCS stuff. Wikipedia with all its awesomeness lead me to discover Pepsi RAW which has already released in the UK http://www.pepsiraw.co.uk/ I just hope it doesn’t suck as bad as Crystal Pepsi. Being from the South we take pride in Coke for some reason. It’s amazing how people felt like they had lost a friend when Coke changed. How a product can seem like one of the family very interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke As far as HFCS its hard to get around it seems to be in everything …..Tre
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i have also done the taste test of the two different kinds of coke. Glass bottle wins!! nasty fountain/canned soda loses… i found out that the imported coke didn’t have HFCS about 6months ago and i will admit that when i go to little restaurants/taquerias that sell these i usually get one. they taste cleaner, bubblier and they are somewhat refreshing. i used to love coke (the nasty kind, before i grasped the concept of why it is sooo nasty) and when i correlated the awful feeling after drinking one of these to the coke i stopped drinking sodas. so i was happy to find out this little secret so i can treat myself every now and again to a ice cold coca cola! :P
i just finished reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” where the author (Micheal Pollan) talks all about this sort of thing. He found the statistic that an average American consumes 66 pounds of HFCS a year on top of all the “real” sugar. During the switch-over from cane sugar to HFCS in sodas, Americans began to increase their consumption of sodas thanks to the brilliant idea of supersizing, thus their intake of processed corn was increased.
HFCS is everywhere, in addition to sodas you can find it in your Ketchup, mustard, cereals, crackers, breads ,and candies… this past year i’ve been more aware of what i eat and things that i used to buy, like my stoned wheat thins, i notice contained HFCS and partially hydrogenated oils. bummer……my goldfish crackers though, escaped these ingredients..hurray!
Pollan also talks about that processed corn is also in other household objects like shampoos, vitamins, soaps, cleaning supplies etc….
he believes that we are what we eat,which makes Americans walking processed corn.
on another topic, Pollan informs us that a chicken-mcnugget has 38 ingredients, and at least 13 of those are derived from corn….some of these ingredients include; the corn-fed chicken, modified cornstarch, dextrose, lecithin, yellow corn flour, cornstarch, partially hydrogenated corn oil, and citric acid. A chicken McNugget also contains tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) which is an antioxidant derived from petroleum….which is also a form of butane. GROSS!
i try to eat foods in which i can pronounce the ingredients thank you very much.
anyways, the food industry, owned by big corporate powers care mostly about making a buck….even if it’s causing people to become more unhealthy. the book also dives into the issue of corn-fed vs grass-fed animals, and how the grass-fed animal meat is much more healthier than the other. but the majority of meet in the markets come from corn-fed animal farms….same thing goes for dairy products….
and as sunshine has already pointed out, processed corn has helped the obesity problem of our country….oh dear…
it’s an interesting book….
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If you can’t find a mexican Coca Cola and you need your soda fix you can always grab a “Jones” Soda made w/ 100 % pure cane sugar. I’ve been on the look out ..lol ….Tre
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most of the snack foods you find out there are corn-based, too. including a lot of those granola/energy/food bar things. you take the cheap base, and you add flavors and colors and call it “nutritious! fast! awesome!” we’ve slowly developed a country full of wheat/gluten-intolerant people for our generations of pumping highly refined wheat products into our children, and i predict the next round will be corn-intolerance. it’s not too late to be nice to your body!
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At first, the American cattle ranchers produced cattle on the plain that was nice and lean, being fed on prairie grass. But, the British found the meat too LEAN, not all fatty and yummy. However, because the Britain were poised to export it’s beef-production to the colonies, a method was arranged with the ranchers that sent all the cattle from all over the country to feed-lots in the med-west, where they were fattened up on, yes, CORN. Fatty, fatty!
Too bad sugar in general is “bad” for you. Especially the digestion… I’ve learned more than I wanted to know about this lately.
Sugar is a recent innovation to the human diet. It was only with industrialization that it became cheap enough for consumption by all classes. Not only that, it was so cheap that factory workers were fed quickie tea-breaks and then, bam! back to work for those long, long days. How economical for those shrewd barons of industry! Rural life was accustomed to seeing breakfast comprised highly of vegetables, and then bread and jam came around the bend. No surprise, we have a massive health decline and larger waistbands. Fat and sugar, the cheap, quickie drive-thru genius for a fast-paced society…
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Hi Sunshine -
Forgive me for being off topic but –
I don’t think I have your current email and I wanted to send you info on a publisher I know (and you might know from back in the punk rock days) in SF about an urgent need for someone with Adobe Illustrator talent to help her company meet a book deadline in San Francisco.
If you know of someone who would embrace the work , could you email your email to me as soon as possible: ——–no such luck smap crawlers———–
- I’d really like to help her out and it could be a good in for a cool job for the right freelancer.
She’s also someone I’d love you to discuss your PUNK book with. :)
Elaine
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Oh my yes please!
I need a publisher, a good editor, and a few more smart, ready, writey friends. Always!
Email sent (and edited out of your above comment for security and smap resistence)
s.
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The last post before yours, is sweeter than sugar. :)
I hope you do get a publisher.
On sugar, I am not a fan. It does undesirable things to my body and teeth.
I remember watching sesame street when I was little, and seeing how much sugar went into coke, I was aghast, even then, before I became a non-sugar person. I do think that high fructose corn syrup is much worse though.
I never liked coke, taste or smell;
I am one of those people who steers away from anything processed. I love when food is in its natural state. (except for the fact that I drink decaf coffee/espresso, which is not so great except for the taste)
I almost get a “sugar” high, when I eat too much fruit, as it has natural sugar in it.
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Glad to see you post this information. HFCS is a major downfall in America! Being a relatively health conscious person and aware of the obesity crisis taking over our nation (esp. children) it has been one of the ingredients I try to weed out of my diet. Wheat (bleached, processed flour) being another. I have seen first hand the results derived from eating foods high in these ingredients and they are not desirous and they are deadly.
~ You ARE what you eat ~
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this just in:
i bought some jars of baby food for training my dog, and do you know what it contains? CORN starch.
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The difference between sucrose (table sugar from sugar beets or sugar cane) and HFCS is that with sucrose, there is a alpha linkage between the 1 carbon on the glucose and the 2 carbon on the fructose, which ends forming a ether link between the two sugars,and spitting out a water. Now, when you eat the sucrose, and it goes into your stomach, this linkage is broken apart via acid catalyzed hydrolysis back into the constituent glucose and fructose, which is then further broken down by the body to produce ATP and CO2 through glycolysis, conversion to Acetyl-CoA, and then the Krebs cycle. Actually, for a food source to provide energy, it must be put into this pathway to produce ATP, the energy “currency” of the cells / body.
I must say, after all that, that food made with sucrose tastes so much better than HFCS.
Also, to Wemily,
“A chicken McNugget also contains tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) which is an antioxidant derived from petroleum….which is also a form of butane. GROSS!”
t-butyl hydroquinone is nothing like butane, chemically or structurally. It is a derivative of hydroquinone, (a phenol with a -OH group in the para position), substituted with tert-butyl group, meta to one hydroxy group, ortho to the other.
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Thanks for the straight dope Erich.
: )
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yay, I found something else to blame the demise of Hawaii’s sugar cane industry on besides the high price of land - HFCS. Or should I blame the advent of HFCS on the high price of production of sugar cane due to the high price of inputs such as land and labor in the US?
Ah well, I drink Diet Coke (yay, aspertame!) anyway.
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Ah nostalgia…. And the ability to make a buck!!! Costco gets it….
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My theory on Coca Cola… if it can eat away and dissolve battery acid corrosion, well quite simply…it just can’t be good for me or my body.
If I crave it, I’ll drink it. My body tells me what it wants. I might analyze it, let it go… and if it comes back up, go grab a fucken soda pop. I had one a couple days ago…before that though, it had to have been at least 6 months. A yummy natural root beer with a little vanilla ice cream in it…mmm, that’s a whole other story.
Summer = Root Beer Floats mmm *drooling*
=)