At least that’s the message from top researchers who wanted to set the record straight.
Let’s lay the groundwork. Three top researchers (as labeled by the press release) wanted to correct the inaccuracies and misunderstandings about high fructose corn syrup and it’s impact on the American diet.
At the Institute of Food Technologists annual meeting, a session entitled “High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sorting Myth from Reality” was held to set the record straight.
The first quote is telling.
Contrary to its name, high fructose corn syrup is essentially a corn sugar, stated sweetener expert John S. White, Ph.D., president of White Technical Research. "Recent marketing claims that sugar is healthier than high fructose corn syrup are misleading to consumers.
Yeah, sort of like saying stabbing myself with a big knife will hurt more than with a small knife. I can read the headlines already. “Leading researchers have discovered that stabbing yourself with a smaller knife causes less pain.” Somehow the whole wound thing gets completely ignored.
It’s convenient for them to gloss over the influence of HFCS (and sugar) in heart disease and a whole host of metabolic disorders, which happen to have coincided with an approximately 20% increase in fructose consumption from 1970 to 2007. Yikes, that’s a big knife!
After a few more mundane quotes aligning the similarities between sugar and HFCS, we get to the meat of the special session and press release.
This is a marketing issue, not a metabolic issue," stated David Klurfeld, Ph.D., national program leader for human nutrition in USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and editor of the June 2009 Journal of Nutrition supplement, "The State of the Science on Dietary Sweeteners Containing Fructose," in response to recent reformulations by manufacturers of products that once contained high fructose corn syrup. "The real issue is not high fructose corn syrup. It’s that we’ve forgotten what a real serving size is. We have to eat less of everything," he noted.
And there you have it…a marketing issue. It’s not about whether people are confused. In fact, these people are confused. They start with marketing and end with just eat less of everything. Can we apply that eating less mantra to HFCS?
It seems more like an act of desperation. Remember the Corn Refiners HFCS commercials? Here’s one and two. And I don’t think people are confused. Here’s a list of HFCS spoofs on youtube. Accurate and funny.
To strengthen my hypothesis, I looked through the exhibitor list of the IFT annual meeting. I sorted by nutritive sweeteners and featured exhibitors. Here’s what I found (it’s an interactive database, so not sure results will come up properly – select featured exhibitors and nutritive sweeteners from the ingredient list). It’s pretty populated, showing a large number of nutritive sweetener exhibitors (somewhere between 40 and 50%). There’s also some overlap between featured exhibitors, sponsors and manufacturers of nutritive sweeteners. I’ll just say it’s pretty interesting…
What’s next, a special session on soy eggs? I produce plenty of estrogen, thank you very much.
Brian
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Asking “Is it okay to be fat?” makes as much sense as asking if it’s ok to be short, or tall, or thin, or blond, or brunette, or blue-eyed, or brown-eyed, or Asian, or Native American, or Black, or blind, or paralyzed, or different in any way from what is considered the “norm”. After all, we have just about as much control over fatness as we have over all the other ways we are different from one another. Of course it’s ok to be fat, just like it’s ok to be thin, or anything in-between fat and thin. The best way to make it mainstream acceptable to be fat is for more and more fat people to learn how to accept themselves as fat, learn to love themselves, and demand the respect and dignity we all deserve as human beings.
Posted by health insurance quote on March 4th, 2010.