{"id":938,"date":"2010-09-22T10:43:56","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T00:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/?p=938"},"modified":"2010-09-22T12:28:30","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T02:28:30","slug":"still-too-sweet-by-any-name-corn-syrup-body-plots-rebrand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/features\/still-too-sweet-by-any-name-corn-syrup-body-plots-rebrand\/","title":{"rendered":"Still too sweet, by any name: Corn Syrup body plots rebrand"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Shutterstock<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Claiming the current name confuses consumers, and presumably spurred by increased negative publicity over the last few years, the Corn Refiners Association<\/a> is now campaigning to ditch the name \u2014 admittedly a mouthful \u2014 in favour of the more palatable title of corn sugar.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

By the mid 1980s HFCS was widely used in many supermarket items, with estimates suggesting consumption grew by more than 1000 per cent<\/a> between 1970 and 1990 in the US.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> in August this year found that pancreatic cancers use fructose \u2014 one of the key ingredients of HFCS \u2014 to fuel growth.<\/p>\n

Not all sources are negative. The Harvard School of Public Health claims that soft drinks that use HFCS are no worse<\/a> 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<\/a> similarly found there was not enough evidence to indicate HFCS could be linked to obesity in 2007.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> that the name is already taken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-health","category-science"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":952,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938\/revisions\/952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}