high fructose corn syrup

amother

Tue, Oct 11 2011, 1:27 pm

I have babies and they love to snack so I buy snack size bags from the supermarket and give them snacks. I started reading the labels of these so called kids type snacks and discovered SO MANY of them contain high fructose corn syrup.
Can someone tell me why HFCS is bad? What is it linked too in children who consume it? Is regular corn syrup any better?
Also, I have like 20 snack bags maybe more, that have this ingerdient in them - do I give them away and get them out of my house now? Or let my kids finish them and then not buy them anymore?

Thanks.

nylon

Tue, Oct 11 2011, 2:31 pm

It's controversial. Some research says that HFCS may be metabolized differently from table sugar. Other research has not confirmed this. (There's also some research suggesting that sweet drinks don't trigger fullness the same way as solid food, and these are one of the most popular sources of HFCS.) The HFCS used in drinks is 55/45, almost the same proportions as sucrose (50/50). There are other blends of HFCS, though. Regular corn syrup (Karo type) is a different blend of sugars and is less sweet. It's not interchangeable with either HFCS or table sugar and is used because of how it behaves in recipes (e.g. it will not crystallize in candies and fillings like sugar).

My take? If you took all the HFCS out of everything and simply replaced it with sugar, we'd probably be no better off. HFCS simply makes it very easy and cheap to load everything up with sugar. The goal should be to restrict the total amount of sugar from all sources.