You miss the point. We are against genetically modified corn, cooked up in a vat, and called natural sugar. It is not natural sugar. There is a difference between the natural fructose in cane sugar and the chemically altered sugar derived from genetically modified corn. You know as well as I do there are countless tests, research articles and scientists who disagree with you.

How can you ignore the scores of tests that opine that high fructose corn syrup is the cause of weight gain and obesity among our nation’s youth. I am certain that you have seen King Corn and Food, Inc. Do you disagree with them too? Are the scientists, farmers and authors interviewed in the films advocating an “emotional argument”? The industry commonly uses the smoke screen that an author is “emotional” to defame them. So who do you work for in the high fructose corn syrup industry?

We advocate the use of organic sugar which contains up to 80 nutrients and is healthy. Refining sugar removes all of the nutrients while containing an anti-caking agent ( sodium aluminosilicate, a man-made synthetic chemical) that causes an increase in blood pressure. High fructose corn syrup is dangerous to mankind and our opinion is supported by a legion of medical experts and scientists. Buy our books and then read the more than 3,000 references cited in the books. We can’t all be wrong.

Oh dear. What a lazy article. If your books are as full of scientific inaccuracies, factual errors, strawmen and deliberate misrepresentations as this essay then you should be ashamed of yourself. You clearly don’t understand how HFCS is made, nor do you understand how cane sugar, organic or otherwise is made. You don’t understand how the corn is sourced. You don’t understand the difference between modified starches, polyols and corn syrup or the reasons that one company might make all of these. You don’t understand that too much organic sucrose will make you just as fat and unhealthy as too much corn syrup. Your research is so poor you “had to go through layers of corporate camouflage to find out who the current owners of Roquette America were”…was the name of the company not a big enough clue? I could spend all day ripping this article to bits but you guys in ‘big publishing’ wouldn’t care. People like you who criticise companies for trying make a profit whilst you peddle your books of nonsense for exactly the same reasons make me laugh. And that is no more ridiculous a statement than the one you will make when you accuse me of being a shill for ‘big food’, which you will, because your arguments are nothing if not boringly predictable. For the record, I’m not.

So when challenged to support your facts you change your emphasis and turns out that actually it’s really just the politics you don’t like? I don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theories but as I’m not qualified to comment on the politics of business I will stick to the science to explain why I won’t be buying any of your books. You seem very keen to push another few sales, it still seems to me like you are in this for the money. Or maybe you just really like books… more than 6000 books and medical reports eh? If you were absorbing properly, annotating and taking notes, even at more than 4 a day each I reckon that is about 2 years full time reading, every day, including weekends! No wonder some of the details got a little fuzzy. Or maybe you read the wrong books?
The synthetic fructose in high fructose corn syrup can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease. What do you mean by “synthetic” fructose? How does the chemical structure differ from “natural” fructose?
The study suggests that at least 16% of the studied populations were consuming more than 25% of their daily energy requirements from sugar-sweetened beverages rather than from protein. So sugar, not HFCS then?
Make no mistake about it, the people who make decisions at the CRA are not farmers or ordinary Americans
We could not find a small farmer among them.
Not exactly a local group of caring, hard-working farmers.
What is it with you and farmers? This is the Corn Refiners Association, not the Corn Farmers Association. This is like saying all butchers are evil because they aren’t farmers.
Can someone explain to us how a company that boasts of making “chemically modified starches” can make claims in advertisements that “sugar is sugar”, and is a natural sugar, when they chemically modify corn to make high fructose corn syrup.
Yes, I can. They take corn, they mill it and separate the starch out. Then they either dry the starch and sell it as corn starch, or they chemically modify the starch and sell it as modified starch, which thickens and stabilises more effectively with less, and stands storage and transportation better. Or they take the starch and they refine it into corn syrup with enzymes. Like your body does when you chew and swallow, as you too are an evil chemical factory. So there you are. They make more than one thing!
High fructose corn syrup did not have cosmetic surgery. It is the same old ugly pig that has been scientifically-proven to cause weight gain, obesity and food addiction under an assumed name.
Sugar, then, is sucrose under an assumed name and also turns you into an unhealthy fatty if you eat too much. Like lovely natural fat. Answer – don’t eat too much of any of them! Easy, isn’t it?
This does not sound like a company making natural products. Are they customizing sugar to increase the profits of food manufacturers? Would that customized sugar be called high fructose corn syrup? Or, by its alias “corn sugar”
Again, you see what you want to see. They say “customized food stabilizer systems and highly functional ingredient blends” which are totally different product ranges and you read ‘corn syrup’.
Roquette is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyols, including sorbitol, mannitol and maltitol. Our products offer healthy alternatives to sugar while retaining the great taste of your product.” Alternatives to sugar? If “sugar is sugar”, why do they say their products are “alternatives to sugar”?
Because they are talking about polyols not corn syrup! Read it properly!
How can they claim a chemically created substitute is healthy? It defies science!
One of your more ignorant and poorly thought out comments.
According to Corn Products International’s website, “For more than a century, Corn Products International has been providing ingredient solutions and innovations to the world.” “Ingredient solutions”? That doesn’t sound like “sugar is sugar” to us.
Sigh. See above
And, their sugar is not sugar either. It is chemically treated, boiled-in-a-vat sugar with chemicals made much like drug dealers make crystal meth.
Emotive stuff, but no, not really. It’s much more like the way sugar producers boil their cane syrup in a vat with chemicals.
The Corn Refiners Association is nothing more than a shill for some of the largest companies in America, and the world.
Wikipedia says “A shill or plant is a person who helps another person or organization to sell goods or services without disclosing that he or she has a close relationship with the seller.” So the corn refiners association with its very public membership is cleverly hiding the fact that they have a relationship with the corn refiners? Really?
If high fructose corn syrup is the same as sugar, why have these nationally known food manufacturers removed them from their products?
Because they are run by the same sort of corporate suit that you hate so much and they are willing to defy all reasonable scientific logic to pander to misinformed public opinion if they think it will make them an extra buck. Even presidents wives aren’t immune from the latest diet fads and media hysteria and those suits will take full advantage. You are the real shills promoting the “healthy food” industry and you don’t even know it!

The only thing I’m angry about, Mannie, is your insistence that I am contributing to this debate because I have “something to gain” I am qualified to degree and postgraduate level in food science and technology (which involved reading quite a few real academic text books, by the way)hence my passing knowledge of the and I now work for a very small company you have never heard of in a totally unrelated industry. I won’t name them because a) it’s irrelevant, they neither make nor use and of the products under discussion and b)these views are mine and not theirs – I doubt they have a view on this subject at all – and I have no wish to associate them with my private opions on a public forum. I have no corporate masters. No economic interest. No payment from the industry. No PR consultants or ghost writers (though I’m flattered that you think my writing is of a professional standard!)Just me, on a pointless crusade to correct all the mistakes on the internet in my spare time. If you look at the times of my posts and then take into account I am in a country 5 hours ahead of your time zone you will see that I work late into the night on this stuff, not in working hours. I guess I do it because I have a strong sense of right and wrong and an argumentative nature. So you are the only one in this discussion making money out of it, and I guess that gives me back the moral high ground. Now you can believe all of that, or you can carry on accusing me of shillery, but you to be honest it does your own credibility no good at all. When you argue your case as poorly as you have in this article, it is a little arrogant to believe that criticism can only come from a team of professionals working on behalf of a corporate behemoth. Stamping your feet and crying foul when you are criticised instead of addressing the criticisms directly just weakens your argument further.

Lifting great chunks of your responses from the websites you reference doesn’t do you any favours either. Cutting and pasting from selected bits of the web that agree with your argument is not journalism, anyone with a mouse can do it. Look, I’ll show you. My argument, put simply, is that fat people are fat because they consume too many calories and don’t do enough exercise, but instead of taking a little bit of personal responsibility they look for someone else to blame. And what do I find in your 4th link?

“But what’s most important is the amount of sugar, not the type, Shoham said. “I don?t think there is anything demonic about high fructose corn syrup per se,” Shoham said. “People are consuming too much sugar.”

See, it’s easy! Perhaps I should write a book too!

Of course, the rest of the quote is

“The problem with high fructose corn syrup is that it contributes to over consumption. It’s cheap, it has a long shelf life and it allows you to buy a case of soda for less than $10.”

Yeah, that’s a problem. Consumers are crying out for more expensive products that go bad more quickly…aren’t they?

I won’t bother critiquing the rest of your latest response because going on past form you will just gloss over my comments and fall back on the old “it’s not fair, the big boys are bullying me” defence. The American Medical Association has already done the job, anyway. Have you written to them to tell them they are wrong? Or…yawn…are they part of the conspiracy too?

So I need to get back to my discussions with the homeopaths. Apparently I’m in the pay of Big Pharma as well as Big Food. As soon as I find out exactly where all the cash I’m supposed to be getting has got too, I might be able to retire and do this full time.

Well well, a lawyer! That does explain the style of your rhetoric. I’ve never been in a courtroom but I have read a few John Grisham books…I wonder if that qualifies me to start a blog to expose the evils of the legal profession?

It also explains the rapid changes of direction when the case isn’t going your way. I am curious as to why you ask me about MSG. Perhaps you are researching another book and want me to help with your research for free, or are you testing me to see if I am just a one trick pony with opinons only on HFCS, in which case I MUST be a CRA shill! Either way I shouldn’t really take the bait, but as you asked so nicely and as I really am an argumentative kinda guy, I’ll bite.

(Im not sure if you are still trying to link this back to the starch industry, as MSG used to be a byproduct of the wheat processors. Did you know that you can make a fructose-glucose syrup identical to HFCS from wheat as well as corn? More common in Europe. I wonder if you would prefer that to to the corn sourced version?)

Anyway, I don’t really have much to say about MSG. From memory it’s a naturally ocurring amino acid that is found in many foods but also added to others as a flavour enhancer. was extracted from wheat gluten but is now commercially fermented. Glutamates in general are the main source of the fifth “taste”, umami, along with sweet, sour bitter and salty. And that’s about all I know, other than despite being GRAS and approved for use all over Europe, America and Asia, it has been demonised by some people as the source of all the world’s ills. Some people are intolerent, of course, but some people are intolerant to milk, eggs, bread, nuts, peas, wheat and many other things, and as the general population enjoy and benefit from these foodstuffs there is no reason for a wholesale ban.

I am taking a wild guess that you would disagree with my relaxed attitude to MSG – more cover-ups from Big Food probably. I might have a scoot around the net to get a feel for the debate and see if I can find any information good enough to change my mind. I am certainly objective and open minded enough to do that and I’m sure you will have a slew of links for me, but I do tend to reject out of hand any poorly constructed studies, anecdotal evidence, anything written by someone who is also trying to sell me snake oil and most importantly, any document containing the word “sheeple” or reminding me that the earth is controlled by lizard people from another planet.

I should end by saying that I decided this morning to back out of this debate,as I didn’t feel we were getting anywhere. But I read your latest response this evening and it ocurred to me that we have managed to remain reasonably civilised (you more than me, if I’m honest)and even if we disagree you haven’t yet issued any badly punctuated death threats, which the hoemopaths and the religious extremists are particularly keen on. So I might have a look at your other blogs and contribute every now and then. You never know, we might end up agreeing about something. Wouldn’t that be weird!

“I fail to understand how anyone can accept a product that contains a toxic ingredient? One that is proven to cause obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, etc, etc”
Kathe, can we assume from the above that you refuse to consume sugar in any form, be it sucrose, glucose, fruit…?

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.”

Paracelsus figured this out in the 16th Century and it is still true today. Eat too much of anything and it will harm you!

Many things have indeed changed in the last 50 years. People live more sedentary lifestyles with less manual labour required at work and at home due to the march of technology, and food is cheaper in real terms and more easily available than ever before. Fine, you can blame the food manufacturers for selling their products aggressively and tempting their consumers to overeat, but why not also blame Ford and Chrysler for making cheap cars so people don’t have to walk so much?

Gary, you are aware that your type 2 diabetes was caused by a high calorie diet and not enough excercise. You started eating more healthily, limiting calories, lost some weight and went into remission. I don’t see how you can pin the blame on a single ingredient. Are you saying that if you had cut out corn syrup and only corn syrup, but maintained the same calorie intake, the results would have been the same?

Gus, I decided to read my blog and see how it is noted. Then I read your blog against the author of the book and attacking me. When I was reading your blogs, I thought you to be an extremly intelligent person until I read all of your blogs and then the one attacking me. I changed my oppinion of you considerably and realize you do have an agenda of sorts against anyone who might believe in the truth. I’m sure you will attack me again, why not show your real colors. I’m sure we’re real interested in that agenda of yours. I have no agenda but to live better and longer, but not with all the crap being injected and added to the our foods. I do know there are a few countries that will not purchase foods from our country. This is your country, isn’t it. You do care about the people in this country don’t you. It sounds to me like you don’t care what people eat and what is really in our foods.

After reading the latest book from Brooks and Barling I started to read nutrition facts and ingredients on food labels much closer. I was shocked to see the number of food products containing high fructose corn syrup and corn solids. I don’t understand why so many foods I cook at home with just a few ingredients have as many as 100 ingredients in the packaged versions. Just look at the ingredients in a frozen dinner. I don’t understand why corn is treated with chemicals to make corn sugar when there are other better safer choices.
Gus makes it sound like its okay to eat chemical junk in our food. It’s not. As a parent, I want my children to eat healthy. How can they eat healthy when all of the choices in the market are full of these chemicals? Every medical article I have read on the internet says that high frutose corn syrup is bad and dangerous to out health and weight. How can the food industry be right and everyone else wrong? I don’t trust large corporations anymore. I see food recalls, E. coli contaminations, drug recalls, Salmonella problems. I see companies like Toyota lying to us about safety. How can we trust the makers of high fructose corn syrup to do the right thing for us and our children. We can’t.