In this video, Coach Erik from Viking Athletics delves into the topic of high fructose corn syrup, aiming to educate viewers on its composition, effects, and dispel common misconceptions. The video emphasizes the importance of understanding ingredients in food to make informed choices and highlights the role of caloric balance in determining the impact of high fructose corn syrup consumption. Prefer to read rather than watch? The transcript is below the video.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:42 Types of Sugar
04:35 Corn Syrups
08:11 Supposed Bad Effects of High Fructose Corn Syrup
08:44 Dispelling Myths
10:50 Final Thoughts

Transcript:

What’s up everybody? Coach Erik here from Viking Athletics and we are back with another installment of the Fitness Edda. The goal of this web series is to educate and to provide context for a lot of things that are going around the internet when it comes to health, wellness, and fitness. I firmly believe that the opposite of fear is education. If you understand what’s happening, how it works, why things happen, then you’re less scared when someone tries to sell you on things.

And let’s be real, the fitness and health and supplement industries are filled with fear mongering. Most of it is crap, most of it is to manufacture problems so that people can sell you solutions which don’t actually fix anything, but I digress. Today’s topic: we’re going to dive into high-fructose corn syrup since it is often touted as the current demon of food ingredients, and it is being blamed for our obesity epidemic.

So, let’s dive in. In order to understand high-fructose corn syrup we need to understand different kinds of sugars. There’re monosaccharides and disaccharides. We’ll dive into that and talk about the claims, about what it does, and put that all in context. And you can decide for yourself whether or not it’s something to avoid.

Monosaccharides

So, when it comes to types of sugar there are monosaccharides and disaccharides. Monosaccharides are types of sugar that cannot be broken into other sugars. So, they can be converted, but typically these are sugars that our body can use. as sources of energy. Complex carbohydrates for example are broken down into simple sugars, broken down into monosaccharides. It’s kind of a base unit.

So, glucose is one that I’m sure everybody’s heard of. It is our body’s preferred energy source. Muscles use it, other cells use it, the brain runs on it, and it is absorbed from bloodstream. It can also be absorbed in the liver.

Then we have galactose. It’s another monosaccharide which can also be absorbed from bloodstream, and then fructose which of course is the main ingredient in high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is also found in fruit. The body cannot use it as an energy source. It has to be converted into glucose first, so it travels into the liver, and it is converted into water, fatty acids, and glucose, and then the glucose can then be used.

I think a lot of the confusion around [fructose] stems from the fact that it has to be converted in the liver first. So, when we get into claims against it, one of them is fatty liver disease. We’ll talk about how that can actually happen and whether or not we should worry about it.

Disaccharides

Then we have disaccharides. So, we had three monosaccharides, and we have three possible combinations of those monosaccharides into disaccharides. So, hydrolysis right here, when you apply enzyme plus water, it breaks the bonds of the disaccharides, and it breaks them down into their constituent monosaccharides. So, we have three of these as well.

Sucrose is table sugar, which is glucose plus fructose. When you digest sucrose, it’s broken down into those two monosaccharides, which are then used for energy. It is naturally occurring.

Lactose is glucose plus galactose. So, you don’t often hear about galactose being a thing. Most people that are lactose intolerant do not produce enough of the enzyme used to break lactose down into glucose plus galactose. It is also naturally occurring. It is the sugar found in dairy.

And then the last combination that we don’t really need to explore because it doesn’t naturally occur is fructose plus galactose, which forms lactulose. And it’s, again, synthetic, and it’s actually used as laxative because we don’t have a great way of breaking it down naturally.

What is High Fructose Corn Syrup?

So, what is high fructose corn syrup compared to regular corn syrup? Both types, well, corn syrup in general, are a sweetener. It is not naturally occurring. They’re synthetic. And they have different ingredients. So corn syrup, traditional corn syrup, it’s not an artificial sweetener in the same sense that sucralose and other sugar alcohols are artificial, and we’ve done a separate video on those but it is a processed sweetener. We’re using natural ingredients to create something that’s even sweeter.

So corn syrup is 100% glucose, and that is an ingredient that is found in baby formula. The Make America Healthy Again movement has been lately pushing against high fructose corn syrup in baby formula, and it’s a total straw man because high fructose corn syrup is not in baby formulas.

We already talked about how fructose has to be processed by the liver before the body can use it. Babies do not tolerate it well, so why would we put something they don’t tolerate in baby formula? We don’t. So that’s just a bunk claim. But for the purposes of education, we wanted to contrast corn syrup with high fructose corn syrup.

It is again a combination of glucose and fructose, very much like table sugar. It is also synthetic. It’s super cheap, which is the reason that we see it all over the place, which will come into effect a little bit later. The one thing that is different between high fructose corn syrup and sucrose, table sugar, is, we talked about sucrose being a disaccharide. It is two molecules combined, but into a single molecule, which can then be separated through a chemical process in the body.

High fructose corn syrup is not a disaccharide. Both of the types of sugar in it, glucose and fructose, are in a solution. So, we do not need to use energy to break that bond and break these sweeteners down further. And then I do want to point out there are two different types of high fructose corn syrup, 42 and 55.

What does this mean? The ingredients in high fructose corn syrup are fructose, glucose, and water. High fructose corn syrup 42 is 42% fructose. So again, not even half of it is fructose. High fructose corn syrup 55 is 55% fructose. Compare that with table sugar, which is 50-50. So right off the bat, we can see that high fructose corn syrup really is not, it’s kind of a misnomer if you think about it. It’s not that different in terms of concentration between, from cane sugar or table sugar.

In fact, per gram, it’s actually isocaloric. One gram of sucrose has the same number of calories in it as one gram of high fructose corn syrup. It’s just that they contain slightly different amounts of fructose.

Claims Against High Fructose Corn Syrup

So, according to, well I think this one’s from Hartford HealthCare, but according to health experts out there, high fructose corn syrup gets a bad rap because it’s the leading cause of obesity, can lead to fatty liver disease, can lead to heart disease, and it can lead to asthma by increasing your mucus production in your throat, which clogs your throat. I have an asterisk next to all of these because these claims need greater context.

Harkening back to the way that fructose is digested and broken down, it has to go to the liver first, where again it is broken down into glucose, fatty acids, and water. So, because your liver is now producing fatty acids clearly fatty acids make you fat and that’s why it leads to fatty liver disease now you’re producing more fat and fat makes you fat, right? No, it doesn’t. This is the argument that led to the low-fat diet of the 80s and 90s and everybody got fatter because of it.

What happens? Fatty acids are easily stored as body fat because there’s no conversion necessary. It can be funneled right into your cells and stored. But we also use body fat for energy. So you are constantly burning body fat and you are constantly storing body fat. They happen simultaneously. It’s not like there’s a switch that alternates between these two. Both processes are happening at the same time. So, it comes down to net energy balance.

Are we burning more fat than we’re storing or are we storing more fat than we’re burning? What determines that? Net energy balance. So, it’s the same thing that happens in the liver. Am I producing enough fatty acid in my liver to lead to fatty liver disease? That depends on whether or not you’re overwhelming the liver, which only happens if you’re in a positive energy balance. You’re storing more energy than you’re burning.

Another name for that is eating more than you burn, which is a caloric surplus. So, at the end of the day, all of these ill effects supposedly caused by high fructose corn syrup only occur if you are chronically in a caloric surplus. That is the necessary underlying condition. It all comes back to calories in versus calories out. There is no escaping that. High fructose corn syrup in and of itself is not inherently bad. It is isocaloric compared to cane sugar. It just happens to contain, in the case of HFCS55, slightly more fructose, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Closing Thoughts

Fructose in and of itself is not bad. People just like scaremonger because it has to be processed by the liver first. But again, the only time you need to worry is if you are constantly in a caloric surplus.

Now, to end things, lending a little credence to the demonization of high fructose corn syrup. As I said earlier, it is very cheap to produce. It is the favorite sweetener used by food companies. And they add so much of it to our food it is easy to over-consume high fructose corn syrup, putting you in a caloric surplus. So, as I said to start this video, education is the key to escaping fear.

You must pay attention to what you’re eating. If you are aware of the ingredients of your food, and you’re aware that, hey, I’m going to have a Coke, and that’s got, last I checked, I think it was something like 42 grams of sugar in a 12 ounce can, that’s all the high fructose corn syrup. You can see how that adds up, and if you’re consuming multiple sugary drinks in a day, it’s very, very easy to go into a caloric surplus.

So, the point of this video is to show that it’s never one single ingredient that is inherently bad. It is always the underlying conditions in which that ingredient is being consumed, and in this case, all the negative health effects show up if and only if you’re in a caloric surplus. So, pay attention to what you’re eating. Don’t listen to the fear mongering. It doesn’t matter if it’s food dyes, it doesn’t matter if it’s artificial sweeteners, if it’s high fructose corn syrup, nothing is going to kill you right off the bat by consuming it, at least the way that it is packaged.

As we’ve said many times before, the dose makes the poison. Ignore the fear mongering, pay attention to what you’re eating, and you’re going to be just fine.

I gave a very high level overview of how things are processed. I didn’t want to dive into the chemistry behind this. If you’re interested in the actual chemical processes that are used for digestion, shoot me a message. I had that in here originally, but I didn’t want to go for 45 minutes and bore people. But I know there are some nerds out there. You’re probably the ones watching this. So let me know if you’re interested. Otherwise, I hope this was helpful. Give us a like, give us a subscribe, comment below with questions, and we’ll see you guys next time.