Posted by Janet Harriett on Sep.16, 2010

ⓒ iStockPhoto - raffaelo

The bad press around high fructose corn syrup seems to be hitting home with food processors. First, companies started reformulating products to use cane or beet sugar instead of HFCS. Now, the Corn Refiner’s Association has petitioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to do away with High Fructose Corn Syrup.

The organization still wants to make the corn-based sweetener. They just want to call it Corn Sugar instead of the much-vilified High Fructose Corn Syrup. In the long and proud tradition of renaming people and products that get undesirable reputations (for example, prunes and Blackwater), the Corn Refiner’s Association is trying to outrun popular opinion. Every indication points to the product itself remaining the same. I, for one, hope they succeed in their rebranding efforts, so we can have the chance to inject some sanity into the discussion of added sweeteners.

One of the bedrock principles of the HFCS advocacy is that it’s no worse than sugar. The flip side of that argument is that sugar is no better than HFCS. Many companies reformulated products with cane or beet sugar instead of corn syrup, without meaningfully altering the overall nutritional profile. The worst offenders in this are companies that replace the high fructose corn syrup with a new product called High Maltose Corn Syrup, which is the same corn precursors refined to emphasize maltose, another kind of sugar, over fructose, allowing the manufacturers to claim that the product is HFCS-free.

The corn sugar rebranding explicitly states equivalence of corn syrup with cane and beet sugar. This provides an opening for health-conscious people to get out the word that refined sweeteners, no matter whether they start off as corn, cane or beet, are all nutritionally empty. A cane-sugar-sweetened soda is as much a source of empty calories as a corn syrup-sweetened soda. While HFCS is a problem, it is not the end of the problem. HFCS is symptomatic of the sugar-creep throughout processed foods, compounded by how processed foods have taken over a bigger chunk of our food intake.

The Corn Refiners Association seems to be aiming at having the shine of “sugar” rub off on the corn product, but as anyone who has ever knocked car doors in a parking lot knows, transfer runs both ways. The taint of HFCS can tarnish, rightly, other highly refined sweeteners.

What can you do?

• Read labels and choose options without any sugars, syrups, juice concentrates or ingredients ending in -ose, or with those ingredients listed farthest down on the ingredients list.
• Look for items with the smallest number of sugar grams on the nutrition label
• Choose an unsweetened breakfast cereal. Better yet, try a mueseli or whole-grain cereal with fruit.
• Cook from scratch more often to reduce packaged and convenience foods

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Posted under Food Facts, Food, Nutrition & Recipes.