Honestly, I've felt like I've been banging my head against the wall. Secondary sources along with the echoed, distorted and deliberately twisted opinions & "common" wisdoms abound, freely available on the net. Primary sources, as in the original, peer-reviewed, research articles are not (typically) freely available.
I am fortunate enough to live in a town with a university: I am undecided how I should make use of this resource, for the purpose of a blog. The beauty and power of digital media comes from the novel ability to hyperlink, thereby elevating essays from mere rhetorical theses to a supported syntheses. The inability to link from a blog back to a source, puts a burden of faith on the reader: particularly if the reader lacks access to the source material.
Regardless, the "controversy" over HFCS stems from an apparent correlation between a dramatic increase in obesity and the increasingly pervasive use of HFCS. Over the same time-period, Americans settled into a sedentary, tech-centric lifestyles while their diets in general came to consist heavily of "fast" and prepared foods. Considering the overarching societal trends, it seems likely that HFCS is a bit of a red-herring.
Everything about this controversy falls along the default lines e.g.
• nature v. science
• free market v. industry lobbyist
• social good v. corporate interest & etc
Presently, there's a movement afoot to re-brand High Fructose Corn Syrup as Corn Sugar, while there are numerous and conflicting studies about the effects of HFCS compared with the effects of table sugar (sucrose).
Knowing [some] of the chemistry helps here─ HFCS is a solution of monosaccharides, containing 55% fructose and 42% glucose─ where sucrose is a 1:1 Fructose//Glucose disaccharide. While considering the healthfulness of HFCS, much has been made about the relative ratios of glucose to fructose and the fact the fructose is unbound. While, it has been established that, the body digests glucose differently from fructose, which may be particularly detrimental to cancer patients.
Importantly, if we're talking specifically about soda-pop, the fact is it may not matter whether it was manufactured with HFCS or Sucrose, as sucrose hydrolyzes in the presence of acids, meaning the fructose//glucose bonds will have been mostly broken by the time of consumption. This holds true for all acidic foods to which sucrose is added.
Still, fructose itself is ubiquitous in our diet and is safe in moderation, except to those afflicted by Fructose Malabsorption, which is similar to lactose intolerance. I think the best solution is mindfulness in our consumption, which will lead to changes in food production practices and eventually re-evaluation of government subsidies.
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