thingstodo - Got a link for that?
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Originally Posted by thingstodo
I Googled and ran across this:
But there's another reason to avoid HFCS. Consumers may think that because it contains fructose--which they associate with fruit, which is a natural food--that it is healthier than sugar. A team of investigators at the USDA, led by Dr. Meira Field, has discovered that this just ain't so.
Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy--that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.
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This is unsourced, and therefore meaningless. Anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all; assuming the reporter didn't make the whole thing up for shock value, they may be misrepresenting or misinterpreting the results.
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Originally Posted by thingstodo
"The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar," says Dr. Field, "but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic."
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Further investigation of Dr. Meira Field indicates that she was associated with the Society For experimental Biology and Medicine. A check of their back catalogue on their website has turned up a lot of work by M Fields (note the s). Apparently Dr. Fields did some work in the eighties relating to copper deficiencient diets in infantile rats in relation to specific carbohydrates. The most relevant abstract is below:
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Originally Posted by Society For Experimental Biology and Medicine
Development of copper deficiency in rats fed fructose or starch: weekly measurements of copper indices in blood
M Fields, J Holbrook, D Scholfield, A Rose, JC Smith and S Reiser
Copper deficiency was induced in weanling rats fed diets whose sole source of carbohydrates was starch or fructose for 7 weeks. Conventional parameters of copper status, plasma copper concentrations, ceruloplasmin activity, and erythrocyte superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity were longitudinally monitored weekly to follow the development of the deficiency and to correlate these indices with the degree of severity of the deficiency. Although 30% of the rats fed a copper- deficient fructose diet died and no deaths occurred in rats fed the copper-deficient starch diet, plasma copper, ceruloplasmin, and SOD activities were reduced to a similar extent in all rats fed copper- deficient diets regardless of the type of dietary carbohydrate. Thus, none of the indices used accurately reflected the greater degree of deficiency or mortality in rats fed the fructose diet deficient in copper. The results of the present study underscore the need for more sensitive tests or alternative parameters to assess copper status in living animals.
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Emphasis mine. Because we don't know the sample size, the 30% mortality rate isn't really significant. Those may have been the unlucky three, and their being fed a diet that's extremely high in fructose may not be the least bit noteworthy. The highlighted text is more relevant.
Dr. Fields' work was only tangentially related to the harmful effects of fructose and doesn't seem to be even slightly related to high fructose corn syrup. Judging by the extracts available, she was studying the effects of copper-deficient diets and the carbohydrates were a mechanism rather than the subject of study.
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Originally Posted by thingstodo
HFCS contains more fructose than sugar and this fructose is more immediately available because it is not bound up in sucrose. Since the effects of fructose are most severe in the growing organism, we need to think carefully about what kind of sweeteners we give to our children. Fruit juices should be strictly avoided--they are very high in fructose--but so should anything with HFCS.
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The first part of this is true, but qualified. The amount of fructose in high fructose corn syrup varies by product, and in most is on the order of 5 to 10% higher than sucrose. The second part is an outright lie; sucrose is very rapidly metabolized. Unless high fructose corn syrup is being linked to mouth disease, there is no functional difference between the two apart from the slight difference in the glucose:fructose ratio.
The 'won't somebody think of the children' clause is pure sensationalism.
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Originally Posted by thingstodo
Interestingly, although HFCS is used in many products aimed at children, it is not used in baby formula, even though it would probably save the manufactueres a few pennies for each can. Do the formula makers know something they aren't telling us? Pretty murky![/I]
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This has absolutely no merit whatsoever.
Perhaps I was unclear. Long unsourced quotes are not compelling evidence. Find me a peer-reviewed or otherwise reputable study stating that high fructose corn syrup is more dangerous than glucose and I'll believe you. Until then, it's so much FUD, in my opinion.
I'm not arguing that high fructose corn syrup is healthy. It's certainly not. My stance is that it's no more harmful than any other sugar. There's no intuitive reason to think it is and so far as I'm aware there is no actual scientific data to the contrary.