Kate Hopkins of The Accidental Hedonist posts her thoughts on the high-fructose corn syrup debate:

The truth? Well, the truth is that we don’t know the truth. No one can say for certain that HFCS is better or worse than cane sugar. When we look to the Corn folks for information, all they point to is the fact that the FDA has allowed the use of HFCS, so it has to be safe, right?

Of course, that’s a bit disengenuous on the Corn folks’ part, because the FDA has NEVER tested HFCS, nor accepted any outsourced test results. The have deemed HFCS as “generally regarded as safe”, which essentially means that No one has been reputed to have died of the stuff.

Any excess of sweetener is a bad thing, whether it’s sugar or HFCS. The question that no one seems to be willing to answer is “Which is worse - Too much sugar or too much HFCS?” Until this question is answered, any indictment of HFCS is premature.

That being said, there’s much to circumstantial evidence that excessive Fructose is really bad for you. I’ve mentioned some of the test studies here. The short version is that excessive frutose in the diet can lead to a magnesium imbalance in the body, spurring bone loss. The University of Minnesota produced a study where it was found that in men, fructose produced “significantly higher levels” of trigylcerides in the blood than glucose does and that “diets high in added fructose may be undesirable, particularly for men.” Finally, University of London researcher P.A. Mayes wrote that excessive fructose consumption causes the liver to release an enzyme called PDH that instructs the body to burn sugar instead of fat. Are these issues worse than those caused by cane sugar? No one seems to be able or willing to answer that.

The one part of the HFCS debate which bugs me is the one that surrounds personal responsibility in regard to sugar intake. According to “An Omnivore’s Dilemma”, HFCS has not replaced sugar consumption in the US, it has merely added to it. In other words, not only are we consuming the same amount of sugars we did 20 years ago, we’ve added HFCS consumption on top of it. Before we can say “HFCS causes obesisty”, we have to be honest with ourselves and say “Too much sweeteners cause obesity”, because the consumption of both absolutely plays into our weight gains.
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Via boingboing

HFCS Facts takes a pro-industry, pro-HFCS stand:

How is HFCS made? The corn wet milling industry makes HFCS from corn starch using a series of unit processes that include steeping corn to soften the hard kernel; physical separation of the kernel into its separate components—starch, corn hull, protein and oil; breakdown of the starch to glucose; use of enzymes to invert glucose to fructose; removal of impurities; and blending of glucose and fructose to make HFCS-42 and HFCS-55. (2)

Both HFCS products share functional advantages, but each offers special qualities to food manufacturers and consumers. The sweeter HFCS-55 has a predominant role in carbonated colas and soft drinks. HFCS-42 is popular in canned fruits, condiments, baked goods and other processed foods for its mild sweetness that won’t mask natural flavors. The dairy industry uses HFCS-42 in fluid products such as flavored milks and eggnog; yogurt, ice cream and other frozen desserts and novelties.
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Sprol.com takes a partisan stand against HFCS, in surprisingly lurid terms:

More stable than sugar against the disintegrating elements (such as moisture), foods with High Fructose Corn Syrup can literally travel thousands of miles and sit on the shelf of your local convenience store forever and (almost) never go bad. Cheaper ingredients meant cheaper groceries for the good American consumer. A win- win situation, it seemed.

Because of the unusually long shelf life of HFCS, store-bought cakes, cookies, brownies, mixes, breads, sodas, juices, tomato sauce and all of the rest could be sold with practically no expiration date. HFCS, despite misleading labels that read “all natural,” is an ENTIRELY man-made substance. It’s almost indestructible. Like Styrofoam, eternal and immortal.

The pornographic underbelly of all this (and there always is one, it seems, where money and government and conflicting desires come into play) is that in laboratory tests High Fructose Corn Syrup causes male rats to never fully develop their testicles. And High Fructose Corn Syrup also causes the hearts of female rats to expand until they burst. Exit pornography, enter horror flick.

But is this a rat tragic story or a human tragedy? Well, hold into your seats because the seemingly innocuous little sweet nothings that Secretary Butz so gracefully introduced to our bellies in the seventies are now linked to obesity, diabetes, and yes, even cirrhosis of the liver. And as if the above were not enough, there is also some preliminary evidence that HFCS is carcinogenic.

In his groundbreaking book FatLand, Greg Critser breaks down exactly how HFCS is metabolized by the human body. In short, because our bodies have absolutely no way of understanding this highly engineered substance…they convert it into storage material and chuck it away…hence we are fattened up.

The explanation goes like this: glucose molecules, which are the building blocks of sucrose, can be metabolized (used, eaten) by any and every cell in the human body. This is not so with Fructose. It has to be metabolized through the liver. Hence, your liver ends up releasing triglycerides into your bloodstream and generally has trouble dealing with this weird substance. Fructose, which used to be advised for diabetics because it did not stimulate insulin production, really does appear to do a lot of fancy footwork with enzymes and other hormones, too. It does not allow the release of the hormone that tells the brain you are full. Hence, you overeat.
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