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Visit the United States and you’ll find it in food items everywhere: High Fructose Corn Syrup is liberally laced through soft drinks, sweets, breads, cereals and condiments.
Claiming the current name confuses consumers, and presumably spurred by increased negative publicity over the last few years, the Corn Refiners Association is now campaigning to ditch the name — admittedly a mouthful — in favour of the more palatable title of corn sugar.
The chemically altered sweetener was introduced in the late 1960s and grew in popularity with American consumer companies, enticed by its comparative cheapness and longer shelf life.
By the mid 1980s HFCS was widely used in many supermarket items, with estimates suggesting consumption grew by more than 1000 per cent between 1970 and 1990 in the US.
Enthusiasm for the sweetener began to wane recently after several studies pointed to damaging health effects caused by the sugar. Researchers at Princeton found that rats with access to HFCS gained significantly more weight than those who just had access to normal table sugar, while a study from the University of California at Los Angeles in August this year found that pancreatic cancers use fructose — one of the key ingredients of HFCS — to fuel growth.
Not all sources are negative. The Harvard School of Public Health claims that soft drinks that use HFCS are no worse than normal sugary drinks and suggests that the biggest concern is one that could be applied to all sweets: overconsumption. A team from the University of Maryland similarly found there was not enough evidence to indicate HFCS could be linked to obesity in 2007.
While the jury is still out on the exact health concerns of HFCS, most parties seem to agree that moderation of all sweetened foods, artificial or natural, is a better drum to beat. And it’s now uncertain whether the proposed name change will ever see the light of day, with reports in the US now claiming that the name is already taken.
