I am trying to eat healthy and have become a avid/manic label reader. In addition to watching carbs, protein and fat I am looking carefully at ingredients. One of the things I have noticed is that more and more products have switched to using High Fructose Corn Syrup as the sweetener instead of just plain old sugar or corn syrup. Everything I have read is that this stuff is really, really bad. It doesn't metabolize as does sugar/sucrose and it causes the system to think it is not getting what it needs and leads you to eating too much and also causes the body to actually convert the calories in the HFCS into fat instead of burning it like normal sugar. I have been looking for it and avoiding any food with it in the list of ingredients.
The thing is the food manufacturers are sneaking into everything and into many things you wouldn't think of to check. In the last few weeks I have discovered the following foods now have HFCS instead of the traditional sugar:
Lea&Perrins Worcestershire Sauce - bummer
Kraft Miracle Whip
Just about every bottled salad dressing except Newman's Own
Ritz Crackers
Any major brands of jarred pickles that is not a Kosher Dill.
Kellogg's Raisin Bran and several other Kellogg's cereals (Cheerios is still cool)
All Ketchup except Hunt's Organic
Any salad dressing you get in the little packets at fast food joints
All soda except Whole Foods Brands
and on and on.
The list grows everyday. Traveling like I do and eating the breakfasts at hotels and some kind of fast food for lunch is making it virtually impossible to avoid this stuff. How much money are the food manufacturers saving with the substitution? I mean how much sugar was being used in the original "What's This Here Sauce" or Ritz Crackers or Miracle Whip?
From what I have been able to observe they don't use HFCS in Europe probably because most if not all of the HFCS is made from GMO corn.
I really think the food people need to be pressed to return to sugar no matter how much it will add to the cost of the product. I don't care about soda pop as I don't drink it except for the occasional diet Coke(which has its own poison).
According to Wikipedia the reason it is becoming so common in U.S. foods is because of U.S. tariffs and quotas on sugar which causes Americans to pay approximately twice the world price for sugar. Need I mention that Archer-Daniels Midland the nation's largest producer of HFCS has been a major lobbyist in support of these tariffs.
Maybe if enough if us stop buying products with High Fructose Corn Syrup then maybe they will get the message.
Here is a link to the Mayo Clinic and an article on why HFCS is bad
Here is the Wikipedia link for HFCS which has some good information.
You can just enter High Fructose Corn Syrup into Google search and read for months.
Updated to add links.
