Why HFCS is no good...

I remember my sister and I staring at the television slack-jawed...were we really seeing what we thought we were?! The boy and girl sitting on the picnic blanket in the park, she pulls out an ice pop and offers it to the boy. I could not believe it when it turned into a Corn Growers commercial supporting High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)!

Okay, so what is the real make-sense-to-me deal with the stuff? First off, it's a seriously altered product. Yes it's made from corn, but I kind of liken that statement to saying "yes, I was made by my great great great great grandfather's DNA". Yeah, it's that far off.

Take corn...and not the GOOD stuff that you eat raw in summer because you love it so... and make it into cornstarch (which is a large percentage glucose). First they treat it with an enzyme (a genetically modified enzyme made by bacterium) in order to break it down into smaller chains of sugar molecules called polysaccharides. Next another enzyme (this one made from by a fungus) breaks the polysaccharides down to make glucose. The last GMO enzyme messes with the glucose and converts some of the molecules into fructose so you have a little more than 40% fructose now and about 50% glucose. But we need more fructose!! So now the product is sent through a liquid chromatography step (complicated lab stuff) that brings the percentage of fructose up to roughly 90%! This almost pure fructose syrup is then blended with some of the less pure syrup to bring the fructose ratio back down to a bit over 50% (52-55%).

So how is it different to your body? And isn't fructose (aka the fruit sugar) good for us? Good question.
In studies, fructose has been found to not stimulate insulin secretion the way that other carbohydrates do. Fructose also doesn't need insulin to be routed into your body's cells! Fructose actually skips the normal carbohydrate/sugar metabolism step called 'glycolysis' and uses another pathway. So it sounds like a good way to get a sugar rush AND sneak around the body's sugar defenses, right? Well, except for the fact that we need an increase in insulin levels in order to let our brain know that we're full! Insulin isn't a bad guy, it's a regulator and transporter. So without the insulin release it ends up being much easier to over eat HFCS-filled candies than it would be to over eat regular sugar-filled candies.

The next not-so-hot result of eating HFCS laden goodies is that because of HFCSs odd-ball method of dodging the regular metabolic pathways, it ends up floating around in our system as acetyl CoA. Usually acetyl CoA is used to make ATP for energy, but when insulin isn't around to metabolize it this little guy goes directly to the liver to be made into fatty acids, triglycerides and is then stored in adipose (Fat) tissue.

This is my more simplified understanding of how this all works. So in the end, if you really want to eat a real cookie that you make at home instead of ripping open a back of ChipsAhoy!. You'll also make your house smell nice if you bake 'em up on your own!