What is high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)?

You might not know HFCS is there, especially if your palate has adjusted to the unnecessary sugary taste it lends to many frozen foods, or the appealing brown color and soft texture it adds to whole-wheat bread, hamburger buns, and English muffins. We might expect it in soft drinks—they’re supposed to be sweet—but it’s also added to beer, bacon, spaghetti sauce, and even ketchup. We each consume, on average, nearly 63 pounds of this sneaky syrup per year in artificial food products.

HFCS has found its way into just about everything on the supermarket shelf because it’s cheap and sweet. Processed versions of peanut butter, baking mixes, jams and jellies—you name it—rely on HFCS to enhance flavors, but unfortunately they also boost calories by adding unnecessary sugar, which is the last thing we need. While our consumption of refined sugar has slowly dwindled in the past forty years, our consumption of HFCS has shot up almost twenty-fold.

Tufts University researchers reported that Americans consume more calories from HFCS than from any other source. Here's my advice: choose the real thing. Get to know what a food’s taste should be—as nature intended it. The artificial sugary taste of HFCS used to enhance food is not as appealing as the real thing. That's right; I'm suggesting that you sweeten your coffee or berries with good old sugar . . . just a sprinkle to develop the natural taste. And by doing so, you will naturally consume fewer calories.

Some researchers say that high-fructose corn syrup’s chemical structure encourages overeating. From a physiological perspective it seems to force the liver to pump more heart-threatening triglycerides into the bloodstream. In addition, fructose may zap your body’s reserves of chromium, a mineral important for healthy levels of cholesterol, insulin, and, last but not least, the regulation of blood sugar, which could partly explain the overeating that is associated with consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

And a study done at the University of Pennsylvania found that fructose doesn’t suppress levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin the way that glucose does. Women who ate fructose instead of glucose had higher ghrelin levels throughout the day, overnight, and into the next day. Bottom line: If you eat or drink HFCS, you’ll actually continue to want to consume more calories, even twenty-four hours later, than you would have had you eaten plain table sugar.

High fructose corn syrup is made from cornstarch and is chemically manipulated to have high levels of fructose (hence the "high fructose" in its name). This increased amount of fructose makes it incredibly sweet. 

It's used in many commercial food products because it's more affordable than sugarcane, but has been shown to have significant negative impacts on our health. For one, it's converted to fat faster than any other sugar. For another, it disrupts glucose (sugar) metabolism and can ultimately lead to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, both of which are precursors to diabetes.