Giving Up High Fructose Corn Syrup
Around early 2002, just a few months after deciding to start my own video game development company I also decided that I would live more consciously.
This meant going beyond my own limits of personal development and moving in to territory that I did not necessarily feel comfortable with. I wanted to consciously move myself out of my comfort zone in to a life that examined every aspect of who I am and what I do.
I realized at the time that this was not an overnight process, what I wanted in 2002 is not what I am seeking in 2008. This is true for everyone’s life and for every stage of our lives. Goals and desires that we had five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, are not the goals and desires we have today. Some goals, a scant few, will remain, the rest have changed so radically — unless we are seriously stuck in a very deep rut of our own creation — we are no longer that same person.
To live life consciously takes an effort every day to stop doing the same-old same-old. It takes energy and drive to examine one new aspect of my life every day.
If I stop examining and changing even for one day, I’m in an immediate danger of going two days without examining and changing my life. Then I’m in immediate danger of going three days. Four days. A week. Two weeks. A month.
Pretty soon four or five years of my precious life have gone by and I’m not even sure where the years went or what I did in that time. This applies just as much to you too as it does to me.
Most people cannot recall what they achieved or did differently last year unless it was a major life event such as getting married or graduating from college. Many people don’t achieve anything or change anything from one year to the next.
I know that giving up soda or giving up coffee doesn’t rank right up there with major life changes, but it was one step on the road to living consciously for me.
In 2003 I gave up soda and a year or so later in 2005 I gave up coffee. I later returned to coffee but that’s another story.
The removal of soda from my diet made a significant difference in my caloric intake and also in the food choices I made after that fact. Soda adds a lot of empty calories, and soda consumption of a few cans per day also changes our perception of what foods taste like.
I understood, from a logical viewpoint, that people who smoke cannot taste certain foods and find a lot of very potent tasting foods rather bland. When I switched away from drinking soda, after a few months I understood on a visceral level what it meant to have a different taste of food.
Conscious Decision
In early 2007 I decided to consciously cut high fructose corn syrup out of my diet as much as I possibly could. This meant no more drinking soda (no problem there), no more fast food (no real problem there), but also examining food labels on packaged foods and switching to alternatives or just cutting out the food completely.
The easiest way I found to do this was prepare and cook a lot more meals at home using fresh, non-packaged ingredients and by reducing as much as possible any and all packaged and processed food products from my diet. As well as the obvious packaged foods this included a lot of canned goods as well, as many of them contain vast quantities of high fructose corn syrup.
For those few that are baffled by high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), it is an artificial sweetener added to a plethora of food products that are consumed throughout the world. High fructose corn syrup is known by different names in different countries, isoglucose in the UK and glucose-fructose in Canada to name two.
HFCS is a corn based product that undergoes industrial processing to turn it in to a sugary sweet liquid suitable for human consumption. The American population has been putting this unnecessary junk in to their bodies, mostly involuntarily, since the 1970s when the FDA approved it as a food additive.
When I drink soda of any kind now I find it far too sweet and cloying; plain and simple it’s a drink I no longer need. I’m not alone in this opinion; other people who have given up soda for any significant period of time have found the same to be true. Modern day soda is just pretty disgusting.
Why do people drink soda if it is so disgusting? For the same reasons that people smoke cigarettes; peer pressure, marketing, advertising, perception, manipulation and then eventually, just plain momentum.
Sugar Cane Taste
In the summer of 2007 I and several other programmers and artists of my company decided to work out of a local coffee shop on laptops for a month or two. At this local coffee shop we’d also pick up our lunch — some of the best tasting sandwiches I’ve ever had — along with drinks to go with them. Several of the programmers decided that they’d order a Coca Cola with their lunch sandwich.
When the programmers opened the bottles, not thinking twice about the Spanish writing on the side, we’re in Southern California after all, and the Coca Cola brand logo is so ubiquitous that we all see the logo not the actual words themselves, there were universal exclamations about the taste.
“This tastes funny. Here, try it.” said one employee handing me the bottle. I tentatively sipped at the cola, yep, tastes weird to me but I haven’t drunk soda in a good couple of years so I probably cannot remember what Coca Cola really tastes like. But from my vague recollection Coca Cola didn’t taste like the contents of the bottle. When someone actually decided to read the labels, looking for a long past due expiration date, the list of contents showed that the Coca Cola was made with cane sugar.
A-ha, the evidence presents itself. Coca Cola made with cane sugar really does taste noticeably different. I’ve tried my own small taste tests and yes, cane sugar not only tastes different it tastes markedly better too.
I would say a large majority of my friends that I have spoken to, have, in the past 12 months, switched their soda drinking habits to soda that contains cane sugar as the sweetener. Several of them are addicted to Coca Cola and go out of their way – and the extra expense involved – to purchase only the imported Mexican Coca Cola.
One of the effects of me giving up high fructose corn syrup, and claiming it as a conscious goal that is visible on my goal tracking sheets to anyone that is interested, is that other people have commented that they are now working to cut down or cut out high fructose corn syrup too. I find this effect of people following along with someone else’s goals to be a pronounced effect.
Changing the Office Environment
I have several friends and colleagues that are heavy soda drinkers, five cans or six cans or even more than that per day, that have made the conscious decision to switch to sodas that only contain sugar cane.
At the Infinite Monkey Factory (IMF) office we originally stocked the refrigerator with any old soda that was asked for, but after thinking about the cost to the company and what I pay my employees to work for me, the cost of switching only to soda made with cane sugar was actually a very small percentage of the office running costs. I am not saying sugar cane is a better health alternative to my employees, but it cannot be any worse than the drinks made with various artificial sweeteners such as HFCS or Aspartame.
I often frequent a local Chinese restaurant that has an awesome selection of hot teas that they serve at the table with the meal. One of IMF’s employees and a good friend of mine, we’ll call him Jeff, often joins my girlfriend and I at the restaurant for a meal that lasts several hours. The tea that is commonly served when you first sit down, my girlfriend and I think can be a little too sweet, but Jeff at the time thought the tea far too bitter.
Jeff essentially drinks upwards of five cans of Mountain Dew or other “hardcore” caffeinated drinks per day.
Jeff cut down on his soda intake drastically a year or so after he learned that I had cut out soda completely. He started cutting the Mountain Dew with non-flavoured Pellegrino, finding that the Pellegrino did not alter the flavour of the soda by much. It was quite comical actually because Jeff even used some of my habitual tricks that I told him about. He would drink his Mountain Dew only from a special glass, in this case a large Brandy snifter. He would carefully measure the Pellegrino in to the glass, and the Pellegrino had to be added after the Mountain Dew to ensure the right mixing of flavours. All of these steps for Jeff were a conscious act. The conscious act made him aware of what he was drinking and how much he was consuming.
About three months ago Jeff finally gave up soda for good. When we last went to the Chinese restaurant he actually found the tea that was served to be a little too sweet for his tastes. He has even mentioned that a lot of foods he used to enjoy are now far too sweet and he has started looking for less sugary options.
I’ve noticed over the past two or three years that a lot of friends have given up soda in varying degrees. Many have given up soda at home and the office and now only imbibe when they go to a diner or restaurant, so the soda, with all of its attendant empty calories, becomes a treat with the special meal, rather than a dietary staple.
No Smoke Without Fire
In 2008 the Corn Refiners Association launched an advertising campaign that included two television adverts. As a rule I don’t watch television but I caught a few minutes of the Food Network over at a friend’s house a couple of days ago and got to see one of the HFCS ads. All I can say is that I was downright angry at the producers of this ad for creating what amounts to nothing more than an insulting and manipulative propaganda piece.
The messages in HFCS commercials are clear: Don’t be so paranoid. Don’t ask questions. Don’t worry about your health. We’ll take care of you. Just eat.
Sure the ad is paid for by the Corn Refiners Association; they’re seeing a slight dip in the consumption of their product, of course the ad will only include positive messages in their favour but perhaps it is time that food adverts start carrying the same rapidly read warnings that drug commercials do. The fact that the Corn Refiners Association is advertising at all in this manner tells me there is something wrong with their product.
The final part of the message – “taken in moderation” – on each commercial is a sly little way of indemnifying the HFCS manufacturers from any lawsuits. “Look! See? We said in moderation right there! You cannot sue us!” It is difficult for many people to take something “in moderation” when it is contained in so many of the food products they eat and is hidden and buried so well in the ingredients list that people don’t know what they are eating half the time.
The abundant portions of food served at restaurants in the USA ensures that when I dine out with clients or go to a restaurant with my girlfriend or friends, and I love dining at both new and old familiar restaurants, I wind up with far more food on my plate than I really need and consequently consuming far more calories than I really need. Without the soda, instead drinking sparkling mineral water, I can reduce that but the portion sizes can be astronomical.
The average soda drinks served in every restaurant, stocked in office soda machines and home refrigerators are so sugary that they contain way too many empty calories for a healthy diet. Aside from the sugar content in the soda it really does alter how other foods taste. If you consume a lot of sugar then everything you eat you expect to be sweet as that is what you are comparing against.
I Feel Sick To My Stomach
As I grow and improve myself through personal development and consciously question various aspects of my life I find that the positive feelings I get from developing as a person can sometimes be offset by the knowledge acquired about a particular subject. A case in point is the sickness I feel when I finally work out the lies told to me about what each and every one of us put in to our bodies on a daily basis. The saying “ignorance is bliss” never ran more true than in the food industry.
The problem I have with HFCS is that it is sneaking in to pretty much every packaged food product out there. It’s almost impossible to visit the grocery store or supermarket without being bombarded with over-sweetened food products containing this sweetener.
Once I consciously stopped eating packaged products that contain high fructose corn syrup or other unnecessary sweeteners I came to a realization of just how sweet everything actually is. Some ordinary packaged food products, and I won’t single any one out here as there are so many, are so disgustingly sweet that it’s a wonder the manufacturer has the audacity to even refer to them as a food anymore.
After giving up overly sweetened food, especially food that contained high fructose corn syrup I realized just how sugary sweet regular un-sweetened foods can actually be.
Giving up high fructose corn syrup made me realize that fruit is incredibly sweet. True organic fruits that I can purchase at the local raw food markets and the organic farmers markets around Los Angeles are unbelievable in their taste and sweetness. Who would ever have thought that I’d consider the plain old cucumber to be sweet.
Too Many Calories
I used to be a really heavy coffee drinker, one or more carafes of coffee per day, and one or more Grande café lattes from the local Starbucks. Add in a packet or two of brown sugar. This is too many calories. This is too much sugar. This is too much fat. This is too much caffeine. I completely gave up coffee whilst doing some consulting for SONY Pictures back in 2005, that gave me a huge two day continuous headache that nothing would cure – except perhaps more coffee – but that’s a story for another time.
I’ve since returned to drinking two very small cappuccinos during the day, and when I drive a long distance I’ll pick up a 16oz coffee from the local Shell petrol station. Not because Shell sells particularly good coffee but because it’s hot, wet, contains a moderate amount of caffeine, I can sip it to keep me awake and when the coffee which I invariably never finish has gone cold I know it’s time to pull over and take a break for a few minutes.
Now I used to drink my coffee with sugar and milk, then later just straight black coffee.
I grew to like my coffee how I like my women.
Strong, hot and bitter.
Strong black coffee was always an acquired taste for most people. Not something you could really come to without having drunk a lot of coffee and gotten used to the taste of it. This is basically the same indoctrination that cigarettes and cigar smokers actually follow. Peer pressure, advertising and manipulation indoctrinates you. The addiction and the lies you tell yourself do the rest of the work.
Since returning to drinking coffee in the form of very small cappuccinos, and the very occasional straight black 16oz coffee combined with giving up soda and later high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners of any kind the coffee is actually acceptable as a drink for its flavour. I appreciate the distinct and individual flavours far more now.
When I first returned to drinking cappuccinos I would allow myself, once a week, on a Sunday, to put the smallest amount of brown sugar in to the foam for that extra crunch but after trying it two or three times I found that the sugar just spoilt the cappuccino for me. It just made the whole experience overly sweet which tells me that packaged food products in general contain too much sweetener and we are consuming far more sugar than we need to be.
After helping my girlfriend move at the end of January to her new house I stayed over for a few days. For breakfast I toasted up some packaged crumpets from Trader Joe’s which are supposed to be reasonably healthy and reasonably nutritious. For certain values of “healthy” and “nutritious” of course. All I had on the crumpets was a small spread of regular butter but I found the whole food item just far too sweet. Even though there were no artificial sweeteners in the crumpet and sugar was listed as one of the ingredients far to the end of the ingredients list this still made the taste unbearable.
We consume far more HFCS than we would sugar because of Government tariffs on sugar, and corn is a hugely subsidised crop in the USA. The production and processing of corn in to corn syrup is expensive but the subsidies make it incredibly cheap.
I’ve been reading a lot of food labels over the past several months since deciding to consciously give up high fructose corn syrup and I’m stunned at what this artificial sweetener and other sweeteners are actually contained in.
Why is there high fructose corn syrup in my healthy, whole grain bread? I bought this whole grain bread because it was supposed to be a healthy option, good for my heart, good for my waistline, good for my calorie count. When a slice of bread is 100+ calories this tells me there are far too many empty calories in it. I don’t need twelve or fifteen ingredients in my bread. Bread does not need to be sweet nor have massive quantities of sugar added to it. Why does my bread even need a vast quantity of sweetener?
Why is there high fructose corn syrup in the “health food products?” Yes, I put that in quotes because anything that contains an artificial sweetener and is listed as one of the first five ingredients doesn’t instill any sort of confidence in me that the product is in any way, shape or form healthy for me.
Why do my “natural” fruit juices need high fructose corn syrup?
Why do my breakfast corn flakes need it?
Why do bottled iced teas need artificial sweeteners?
Why do my low fat “organic” yoghurts need to contain HFCS?
Why does cheese need to have sugar added to it? I’m not talking about a cheap “Cheese Wiz” cheese in a squirt can. This is a major cheese brand available throughout California and parts of the USA.
Why do we even need sweeteners in pretty much all processed foods?
I’m Eating What Now?
I’ve read extensively through the scientific literature on the mechanical and chemical process of what it takes to make high fructose corn syrup and the other artificial sweeteners that are put in to food products that most people purchase.
Let me put it as simply and as plainly as I can; there is nothing “natural” or “organic” about HFCS. Even the refined sugar that most people think of when they think “sugar,” good old regular white table sugar, is prepared in strange and weird ways. Obviously regular sugar is prepared and processed through strange means but all of them can be duplicated in a regular household kitchen. It is impossible to even try to create high fructose corn syrup or the other plainly artificial sweeteners without an industrial chemistry lab. Anything that alien in the human food chain doesn’t belong there.
One of the things I absolutely detest about caloric sweeteners is how they attempt to hide themselves behind other names. Switching one product name for another or releasing the same product under multiple names is designed with only one purpose in mind. Confuse Joe Public so that they’ll not know what crap it is they are buying.
This is such a dubious practice that some additive and sweetener manufacturers are allowing packaged food producers to actually use the names of the branded and trademarked additives without any capitalisation or trademark symbol so that the inclusion doesn’t make the additive stand out on the ingredients label of the food package. This practice is so detestable that it basically gives a lot of credence to the paranoia surrounding these artificial sweeteners.
I wonder why it is that companies feel the need to disguise a food additive behind various brand names if it is as harmless as they claim.
I wonder why companies need to put out propaganda ads for food additives if they are as harmless as they claim.
I’ve Had How Many Calories?
I’m stunned by how many unnecessary calories are contained in what amounts to what should be very simple food products.
Bread. Drinks. Yoghurt. Cured meats. Sausages. Soups.
All of these products have massive quantities of sweetener in them. Why do I need sweet soup? I make soup at home quite regularly and I probably don’t use more than a half a teaspoon of sugar per litre of soup. Even when I make crepes I don’t use more than a half-teaspoon of sugar for the 400ml of batter mixture. This is considered a super sweet desert, something that is unhealthy because of what it is.
It’s plainly obvious for anyone who has done even a modicum of research through the various peer reviewed scientific and nutrition research that is published that not all calories are created equal. I can consume massive amounts of calories, and I do mean massive amounts, more than 200% of daily recommendations, from non-processed fruits and vegetables and still lose weight on a pretty sedentary lifestyle. My lifestyle consists of walking for 30 minutes per day, walking around the office, and sitting in my office chair for upwards of 12 hours per day.
It’s pretty simple when looking at the research and what people are eating; refined sugars are bad for you. There are a number of food additives and ingredients in food that are plainly bad for the human body but the sheer amount of sugar consumed totally screws with a body’s metabolism and hormone production. Pretty much everything that happens in your body is controlled in some way by the release of hormones. Hormones are one piece of the signalling mechanism in the human body and when it fails the effects can be adverse.
Bad Food vs Good Food
It isn’t food that is bad. Regular, healthy food, food you make at home, food that does not come out of a packet, food that has never seen the inside of a “processing centre” could never be bad for you.[1] Processed foods, food stuffs that are mostly man made, food stuffs that require industrial processes to produce, these are not good for you. You can eat them in moderation, but the moderate amount is so small a quantity that anything more than a mouthful or two per day is sure to do you harm in some regard.
Adding artificial sweeteners to processed foods turns a product that most would consider bland and un-edible taste reasonably good.
There is so much sweetener in most food products these days that I honestly believe people would consume shit if it was loaded with enough refined sugars.
No, wait, wait. I believe that many people do actually consume shit loaded with sweeteners.
Anything produced in an industrial processing system that requires so much manipulation to make it palatable is purely and simply shit.
As the production and consequent unintended consumption of high fructose corn syrup has increased among the American populace so obesity rates have increased right along with it. Yes, there are other factors to take in to consideration, fat intake and sedentary life styles are two, but if two lines, obesity and high fructose corn syrup parallel each other on a chart, there’s a pretty good chance that one is to blame for the other.
Data regarding the effects of consuming high fructose corn syrup may be inconclusive but after having read and analyzed more than sixty differing scientific studies that report varying causal links between HFCS and obesity, blood pressure, ADD, heart disease, mood swings and many other dietary effects I start to think “maybe there is something here and maybe I should stop consuming this crap.”
Everything In Moderation
The old adage “everything in moderation” holds very true for pretty much everything. The problem is that when high fructose corn syrup is contained in so many food products you cannot be moderate unless you spend a good part of your life ensuring you aren’t eating food that contains the artificial sweetener.
There may well be nothing in consuming “moderate” amounts of high fructose corn syrup, but just like any other refined sugars, HFCS is pure and simple empty calories that do no good to anybody.
I’ve heard and read a lot of talk about how high fructose corn syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners. This was even stated by the AMA in 2008, but why don’t we analyze that statement. “Does not appear” and “more than other caloric sweeteners” are the key phrases. Why “does not appear?” Because the studies so far, based on only a few years of research and a dearth of actual hard data means that any scientist or medical professional worth their salt is going to hedge their bets until they have conclusive evidence to support their case.
When someone with professional credentials with one or two data points and a few hearsay rumours goes out on a limb with their opinions I can pretty much write off anything they have to say on the subject. They are pontificating for the world’s press and their own aggrandizement.
“More than other caloric sweeteners” means purely that the one and only peer-reviewed publically available study conducted so far with regard to obesity and sweetener intake didn’t want to single out any one sweetener. It would come down to the “HFCS is bad, but all this other stuff is okay because the report didn’t say it wasn’t, mmkay?”
This is how the minds of people work.
This is how the minds of marketing people work too.
You can sure as hell bet that if HFCS was shown to have a higher causal link with obesity than, say, Aspartame, that the manufacturers of that toxin would jump on it with both feet and claim Aspartame to be healthier in some way than HFCS.
The only real way to avoid high fructose corn syrup is to eat mostly natural foods, cook at home, avoid the lower end restaurants and pretty much all fast food joints, and avoid most packaged and processed food goods found in the local supermarket.
A Groundswell Movement
It is interesting to see that the small chain of PCC Natural Markets in Washington State has gone completely high fructose corn syrup free in all of the products they stock.
Unfortunately I live in Southern California so I cannot benefit from this manoeuvre. The local Whole Foods just around the corner from where I live does have a small section of foods that are high fructose corn syrup free but the selection is very limited. I still have to be wary shopping at Bristol Farms, Whole Foods or the myriad other natural/organic food shops and retailers to determine what each packaged food product contains.
There is a slow but steady increase within the marketplace of food products advertising themselves as high fructose corn syrup free. Many of these products are doing the right thing and either reformulating their recipes to replace HFCS with regular sugar or removing the added sugars altogether. A few dubious manufacturers have just changed the name of high fructose corn syrup to some other dazzlingly complex group of words and a few others exchanged high fructose corn syrup for other brand name sweeteners that are probably worse than what was being used previously.
If you want to do your body some good, start removing overly sweetened foods from your diet that contain either artificial sweeteners or are laden with refined sugars. Switching even a portion of your diet away from pre-packaged, processed food products to fresh foods you have to prepare yourself is the easiest and least life adjusting act you can do to prolong your health and well being.
[1] Assuming the food is not contaminated or laden with bacteria or pesticides in some way.