HFCS has its own devilish ways to affect our weight and fat content without violating the Prime Directive (i.e., weight is about calories in vs calories out). The digestion and metabolism of fructose differ in several specific, vital ways from those of good, old-fashioned, natural table sugar. (I emphasize “natural” because just as white bread is manufactured from wheat, HFCS is manufactured from corn; neither is natural.) Table sugar stimulates the production of insulin and leptin and suppresses ghrelin, which efficiently and properly digest and store sugar’s calories for prompt retrieval when needed for clean energy. They also tell us when we’re full so we don’t keep doing just what the food manufacturers and merchants want us to do: eat WAY past satiety. Could you drink a half-gallon tub of Big Gulp if it were water or milk or OJ rather than pop full of HFCS which disables your FULL gauge?
Confused because you know that table sugar is about half fructose, fruit is healthy, and fructose is a natural sugar present in all fruits (get it . . . fruc tose . . . fruit sugar)? Don’t be; nature packages her natural fructose with all the other enzymes, vitamins, and minerals necessary -- including the other sugar in table sugar -- to digest and metabolize and store the fructose properly. Fruit doesn’t contain a lot of fructose anyway, unlike the fat-free Kraft salad dressing whose first two ingredients are water and corn syrup. HFCS manufactured from corn is not truly food; it’s essentially a high-calorie chemical that happens to taste sweet. ITS MOLECULAR CHAIN IS A LEFT-HANDED SPIRAL, FERGOODNESSSAKES! Think about it: they also make gasoline additives for your car from corn. Hello!
This unnatural, stripped-bare HCFS enters our gut like a fight-bred pit bull enters a poodle show, daring anyone to tame it. It robs our bodies of the micronutrients required to digest and assimilate it, and much of it passes on to our large intestine undigested, at which point it often gets converted from pit bull to liquids and gasses we’d much rather not deal with. Consuming a heavy dose of straight fructose such as HFCS shortly before exercise revs up our body means more fructose gets sent on to the gas factory. Some GI tracts adapt; about 20 million don’t, which may explain the relatively low cost of gas in the United States.
What should we and our kids drink when thirsty? Uhh, WATER! Everything else is food that happens to be a liquid, and much of it junk food, i.e., man-made stuff sweetened with man-made HFCS, i.e., calories -- and maybe trots -- in a bottle.
