Is Corn Syrup Worse Than Sugar?
By Joy Bauer, M.S., R.D., C.D.N In the 1970s, food manufacturers began replacing more and more of the regular white, granulated sugar in their products with corn syrup because it was substantially cheaper and extended shelf life. Shortly after this new, manmade sweetener exploded onto the scene, obesity rates started to climb at an alarming rate. After several decades of observing these concurrent upward trends, the logical question arose: Is the increasing amount of high fructose corn syrup in the US diet partly to blame for our country’s obesity epidemic? To better understand this complicated and controversial topic, we’ll have to take a detour into the world of chemistry. (If you’d rather not drag up bad memories of high school science classes, you may want to skip to my bottom line at the end of the blog). In many ways, high fructose corn syrup is not all that different from the regular, white table sugar we add to coffee or homemade baked goods. Table sugar is made up of two diffe
