Corn Syrup and Metabolism

[Xeriar]

So, awhile ago on another board, someone mentioned that America's obesity problem seemed to begin when manufacturers switched their sweetener from sugar to corn syrup.

I was beginning my diet as I read this, though I didn't pay it much mind, and my mother was rather skeptical. I lost over a hundred pounds on my diet (kinda Atkins-like, trying to keep the grams of fat and carbs below a certain level so that, so long as you only eat when hungry, you won't be able to gain weight).

Lately I've been laxing a bit, and suffered a sudden, recent gain of around 20 pounds, after a bit of a binge on foods that were high in said corn syrup. Only, the extra stuff that I ate could not possibly account for 20 pounds.

Has anyone seen any studies done of corn syrup and metabolism?

 

[The Don]

A couple of unsupported observations:

Really rapid changes in weight often have a significant de/re-hydration component. My weight can change by up to 7lbs depending on whether I'm full to the gills or de-hydrated.

To gain 20lbs you'd need to consume an additional 70,000 kcal or so. This could be as little as 70 large bottles of carbonated beverage.

Americans are fat because they consume more calories than they expend. Corn syrup is an issue becuase it's in everything adding to the caloric load.

Talking about metabolism is IMHO avoiding the issue. You gained the weight because you did not fundametally change your lifestyle. The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to adhere to a program of diet and or exercise that you can keep to for the rest of your life.

 

[El Greco]

TD is correct. The only thing that determines your weight changes is calories ingested vs calories expended.

No food can significantly alter your metabolic rate. There are very small differences related to the meals timing and the macronutrients ratio but nothing that can make a difference for anyone except some advanced athletes. Even conditions like hypothyroidism don't slow down metabolism as much as most people think.

Corn syrup has about 280 kcal per 100gr. Let's assume your maintenance calories are eg 2500 (including all your activities). Even if you eat nothing but corn syrup (or sugar, or anything else) you wouldn't be gaining weight if you stayed below 2500 kcal.

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

I think what you are probably referring to is that, unlike table sugar (sucrose), which must be broken down into glucose and fructose by your digestive system before it can be absorbed into the blood stream, high-fructose corn syrup is composed of glucose and fructose in their pure forms, and can be directly absorbed.

This faster rate of absorption can result in your blood sugar spiking, which results in too much insulin being released.

To make a long story short, eating large amounts of sugar makes it difficult for your body to properly regulate blood sugar levels, which in turn makes it more difficult to control your hunger and activity levels. Straight glucose is the worst for this problem, followed by high-fructose corn syrup, then sucrose, then fructose, then lactose, and finally starch.

As the others have said, if you gained weight it is simply because you ate more calories than you burned. Eating lots of sugar may have contributed by making it difficult for you to properly maintain your activity level, and control your hunger, but more likely the main effect was simply that you were eating a lot more calories to begin with. Remember that a large coke from McDonald's (1 quart) has about 400 calories. That's roughly the equivalent of eating a half pound of beef.


Dr. Stupid

 

[parrotslave]

According to University of Minnesota professor John Bantle, the body metabolizes high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) differently than sugar. Fructose blunts the body's ability to recognize when it is full and increases a person's appetite.

I was reading labels on Ben & Jerry's when I was grocery shopping and noticed that they have moved away from using HFCS. Not sure if it is because of health concerns or just because ethanol production is raising the cost of corn and HFCS. Either way, it is a welcome change.

 

[TheJim]

Thank you Simpson J Cat for that explanation. I first heard about how HFCS broke down differently in the body about 5 to 10 years ago but when i was looking for the exact reason why i could never find a good explanation.

 

[ysabella]

One other factor to be considered. Stored glucose, in the muscles, binds with water to form glycogen. When you eat low-carb, you tend to deplete that store and pee out the water, hence the very rapid weight loss in the early weeks. Then when you consume something sugary, your muscles store up some glucose which brings along water, increasing your weight quickly.

 

[strathmeyer]

I was reading labels on Ben & Jerry's when I was grocery shopping and noticed that they have moved away from using HFCS. Not sure if it is because of health concerns or just because ethanol production is raising the cost of corn and HFCS. Either way, it is a welcome change.

Unfortunately, B&J's has an unnecessary amount of sugar in the first place, making it a bad cheat food for us health nuts.

 

[Kaylee]

According to University of Minnesota professor John Bantle, the body metabolizes high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) differently than sugar. Fructose blunts the body's ability to recognize when it is full and increases a person's appetite.

I was reading labels on Ben & Jerry's when I was grocery shopping and noticed that they have moved away from using HFCS. Not sure if it is because of health concerns or just because ethanol production is raising the cost of corn and HFCS. Either way, it is a welcome change.

I learned about this last fall also. Another thing that surprised me was the high amounts of different types of sugar/corn syrup in so many different foods. Sugar isn't just in the candy, cookies and cake! It's in the breads, cereals, yogurts, salad dressings (esp. the low-fat ones), soups, peanut butter, you name it.

The FDA does not require companies to distinguish between the sugar that is naturally already in the food and the ones that have been added. This can make it a little difficult to follow the World Health Organization's guideline of limiting "free sugar" to no more than 10% of one's daily calorie intake. (See note at bottom of my post).

What I decided to do was look for brands that only added one or two types of sugar at the most and listed them towards the back of the ingredients listing. I started buying plain yogurt and added my own fruit and/or vanilla flavoring and sometimes honey. Yes in effect I am just adding my own sugar, but it's much less than what the food manufacturers normally add.

Here's some alternate names for sugar:
http://www.wellnesstips.ca/sugar.htm

Anything that ends in "ose" is a form of sugar, such as glucose, sucrose, fructose, maltose, lactose, dextrose, galactose etc. Also watch for "monosaccharides" or "disaccharides", which are also fancy names for sugar.

Also I learned that MSG has a side effect of whetting people's appetite also (no links, but just pop MSG and obesity into the PubMed database and you will get a lot of information) -- so anyone interested in reducing food cravings might want to try to eliminate MSG from their diet also.



* Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

The World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization's joint expert report on Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases (WHO Technical Report Series 916) advises carbohydrate consumption of 55-75% carbohydrate, but restricts "Free sugar" intake to 10%. Its definition is "The term "free sugars" refers to all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices." (page 56 of the report; note to Table 6: Ranges of population nutrient intake goals). This is their effective split between simple and complex carbohydrates.

 

[Psi Baba]

I've been wondering about this whole corn syrup thing myself. Practically everything in a package has corn syrup in it, and often unnecessarily. In the U.S. corn is way too plentiful and way too cheap (there was a time that sugar was actually the cheapest way to add bulk and weight to a food product until the price increased and remained high), so it's used in virtually everything.

I've noticed that salad dressings often contain corn syrup. What the hell is corn syrup doing in salad dressing? Salad dressing should start with vinegar, oil, and seasonings, then add maybe cheese or cream or whatever. No place for corn syrup. Sorry! The other day I was reading the ingredients on a jar of (store-brand) jelly I have. First three ingredients are: Grape juice, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup. Just like that. The food industry uses a deceitful trick known as "ingredient splitting" which is where you give the same ingredient two different names in order to legally place them further down in the list. So in the example I just gave, corn syrup is in fact the most abundant ingredient, not grape juice (where's the fruit pectin?). Undoubtedly, if you added the weights of the "high-fructose corn syrup" and the "corn syrup" they would outweigh the grape juice. So in reality, this is not jelly, but grape flavored corn syrup. Nice. And people are feeding this to their kids probably thinking it's probably akin to fruit.

 

[Kaylee]

I've been wondering about this whole corn syrup thing myself. Practically everything in a package has corn syrup in it, and often unnecessarily. In the U.S. corn is way too plentiful and way too cheap (there was a time that sugar was actually the cheapest way to add bulk and weight to a food product until the price increased and remained high), so it's used in virtually everything.

I think one of the reasons this is done is because it's an inexpensive way to make things taste good. We are hard wired to have a sweet tooth. If the grapes going into the jelly and the tomatoes going into the canned soups are of inferior quality -- no problem! Just add sugar (and msg also for the canned soups) and people will still buy it! And even if the manufacturers are using quality ingredients, they may still decide to add sweetners out of the belief that people will prefer their sweeter product to their competitors unsweetened product and be more likely to buy it. Judging by whats on the grocery shelves that seems to be a good theory.

I've noticed that salad dressings often contain corn syrup. What the hell is corn syrup doing in salad dressing? Salad dressing should start with vinegar, oil, and seasonings, then add maybe cheese or cream or whatever. No place for corn syrup.

People want a low-fat product so manufacturers remove the fat. To make the product still taste good they replace the fat with corn syrup.

Ironically, the sugar will increase the odds of sugar cravings occuring and people can easily end up wanting to eat more more food as a result of using a low-fat but sweet salad dressing than if they had used a non-reduced fat salad dressing.


FWIW, I have found that if I allocate between 25 - 30 % of my calories to fat, that helps cut down on my food cravings also. Its easier for me to be satisfied with less. I've learned that fat is not necc. bad, especially if it's in the form of olive oil, avocado, eggplant dips, etc.

The food industry uses a deceitful trick known as "ingredient splitting" which is where you give the same ingredient two different names in order to legally place them further down in the list. So in the example I just gave, corn syrup is in fact the most abundant ingredient, not grape juice (where's the fruit pectin?). Undoubtedly, if you added the weights of the "high-fructose corn syrup" and the "corn syrup" they would outweigh the grape juice. So in reality, this is not jelly, but grape flavored corn syrup.

Agreed. Which is why I listed the alternative names of sugar up above. Before I looked into this, I had not realized that all the various forms of sugar commonly listed in the ingredient listings were sugar, I had thought some of them were preservatives.

 

[Miss Anthrope]

Not so fast.

A couple of unsupported observations:

Really rapid changes in weight often have a significant de/re-hydration component. My weight can change by up to 7lbs depending on whether I'm full to the gills or de-hydrated.

To gain 20lbs you'd need to consume an additional 70,000 kcal or so. This could be as little as 70 large bottles of carbonated beverage.

Americans are fat because they consume more calories than they expend. Corn syrup is an issue becuase it's in everything adding to the caloric load.

Talking about metabolism is IMHO avoiding the issue. You gained the weight because you did not fundametally change your lifestyle. The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to adhere to a program of diet and or exercise that you can keep to for the rest of your life.

Suffering from hypopituitarism myself, I have it on the authority of my endocrinologist and my own experience that I can and often do gain weight on 1500 calories per day with exercise seven days per week.

And then look at this:

British Scientists have found the fat gene.

A gene that contributes to obesity has been identified for the first time, promising to explain why some people easily put on weight while others with similar lifestyles stay slim.