Recent topics over at Hit & Run have led me to do a little bit of investigation into the exact nature of High Fructose Corn Syrup. One of the trolls commenters over there, a “Dave W” is absolutely convinced, beyond all evidence, that High Fructose Corn Syrup used to sweeten things is causing some sort of rise in diabetes. Also, that it is a conspiracy, and that scientists are too lazy to investigate his supposed causal link.
I am no scientific expert, but there are some basics that need to be gone over, and those are not that hard to understand, frankly. First of all, what’s the difference between High Fructose Corn Syrup and sucrose (table sugar)? Frankly, when it comes to soda sweetening, not all that much. The HFCS used in colas has a fructose/glucose sugar ratio of 55/45, by contrast sucrose is a disaccharide that’s 50/50. The other main difference is that in sucrose the fructose and glucose are bonded together, whereas they’re already separated in High Fructose Corn Syrup.
HFCS at that proportion can also taste sweeter than sucrose. It’s on the order of 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose at that concentration, at the 42% fructose concentration it tastes about the same and at the 90% fructose concentration it is much sweeter. The industry site linked above claims that HFCS-55 is taste-equivalent to sugar and can be substituted on a 1:1 basis.
I’ve seen the 1.3:1 number in more places than the 1:1 number, so for what follows that’s what I’m going to use. In the extended entry I will do the same sort of calculations for the 1:1 ratio of HFCS to sucrose. I’ll get along to how the nutrition would work out differently with taste-equivalent amounts of sucrose versus HFCS in a minute, but first I want to talk about the sugar proportions of a popular substitute for soda: apple juice.
As an example, Tropicana 100% apple juice has 25g of sugar per 8oz serving, 48g in the 15.2oz container that you find standard in most convienience stores. In a 100% apple juice product, there is roughly a 2:1 ratio of fructose to glucose with sucrose composing 10-20% of the total sugar, meaning that somewhere between 58% and 70% of the total sugar in a commercial 100% apple juice product will be fructose. Meaning that of the 48g of sugar in the aforementioned container of apple juice, something like 27.84g to 33.6g is fructose.
Over a 12oz serving there are 37.5g of sugar in that apple juice, which translates to about 21.75g to 26.35g of fructose per 12oz portion. If you compare this with the 39g of sugar in a Cocacola Classic 12oz can, which is 55% fructose from HFCS and thusly 21.45g of fructose, you can see that by-and-large on an equivalent serving basis the apple juice and soda have about the same amount of fructose. In some cases the juice might, in fact, have quite a bit more. Granted, the apple juice has a few nutrients that are, well, rather lacking from the soda, but on a purely sugar basis the amount of fructose in each is roughly equivalent.
In the context of banning soft drinks in schools, to replace them in the vending machines with juices, this won’t accomplish much. Even if one concedes, out of sportsmanship, that fructose is somehow worse for you than glucose, apple juice will provide the same more fructose than soda on a unit-volume basis. Citrus juices are about 50/50 fructose/glucose, and so on a unit-volume basis will provide slightly less fructose than soda. Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice (original), for instance, has 33g of sugar per 12oz serving, half of that is fructose, so it’s 16.5g of fructose per 12oz serving. Does a 4.95g difference? Maybe, but being that your just swapping fructose for glucose, and the metabolic processes aren’t too different, I’m going to guess not. The difference works out to about 4 lbs of fructose replaced by glucose, assuming one traded one 12oz serving of soda for one 12oz serving of OJ everyday of the year. Not really all that much, when you think about it.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on to examine what would happen if all of the HFCS in soda was replaced magically, overnight, by sucrose. If HFCS is 1.3 times as sweet as sucrose, that means that the 39g of sugar in Coke from HFCS will be replaced by 50.7g of sucrose to achieve a taste-equivalent level of sweetness. So, of those 50.7g of sugar, 25.35 of them would be fructose. Thusly, not only would your total sugar intake increase by 30%, but your intake of fructose would increase by 18%. If fructose is worse for you, it is hard to see how this might be an improvement*.
This all leads to one very obvious conclusion, even from a guy who only understands the basics of chemistry: that switching to sucrose from HFCS for the purposes of sweetening soft drinks is unlikely to have a large effect on the amount of fructose one consumes. Further, at worst, it could increase total sugar consumption fairly substantially. So, Dave’s of the world, please relax and have a nice cold soda. Put it on my tab.
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* If the industry claim of 1:1 substitution for HFCS and sucrose is true, then the total sugar intake would remain the same and fructose consumption sould fall to 19.5g per 12oz serving, or about 10%. One can conclude, then, that changing to sucrose at best will only lower fructose consumption 10%, and could well raise total sugar intake fairly substantially.
