sugar versus corn syrup?

Also, this is random, but I'm curious.

I have been trying, without success, to cut soda out of my diet on weekdays, what with thyroid and health and whatever, and well. This would work if I didn't have to go to work, where somehow, the two minutes it takes to make tea feels like a lifetime and the coffee at work does really unfortunate things which aren't mentionable in polite company so please don't ask.

However, a couple of weeks ago, Pepsi Original (WITH SUGAR!) came back again and I switched to drinking that, figuring if I am going to be unhealthy I might as well drink something I love. There is no fructose or related corn syrups. And my weight dropped. Like, in a way that was vaguely disturbing, as my favorite jeans now require a belt and I love my jeans.

Now granted, I am in the middle of thirty to forty-five minutes a day of Dance Dance Revolution 3 on Difficult Level (God I love that game), but a.) I am not interested in losing weight (did I mention I went up a cup size last year and happiness?) and b.) I am not trying to lose weight, and c.) I've only been doing this for about five days, so there's no fucking way. I freaked with my jeans and verified with the scale there's been at least a seven to twelve drop in the last three and a half weeks (corresponding when I went through my trying-to-quit-soda to started-original-sugar-pepsi). Now granted, I have been religious in taking my thyroid medication, but I'm five ten and no matter what BMI says, there's a point where I start to take on the vague look of someone who has far too many bones and to remind myself, I pull out high school pictures of the dark days of 130 pounds and college 125 to 150 and wince heartily because no, no, and God no. And also, my hair. God. What was I thinking? Which is why you will never see pictures of me from that age, because it's fucking creepy.

Does sugar burn off faster than corn syrup or something? Granted, we're talking combination of factors, but that's the only two things I can verify have changed in my diet. Well, fine, and I got more Duncan Donuts coffee (my God, yes), but really, if that was the answer, I think it would be a lot more popular.

I also want to recommend Dance Dance Revolution 3. It has a rickroll and that is awesome. It also has Ice Ice Baby, Just Dance, Enjoy the Silence, and Hungry Like the Wolf. The latter two confuse Child a great deal (Wolf with added WTF--seriously, this and seeing the video to Africa by Toto are incredibly, painfully jarring). There's just no way to explain the eighties video aesthetic. There's also no way to explain The Space Dance, really; that's just disturbing. Gorillaz, however, is never not awesome. The surreality of three separate decades of music cannot enough be commented on.

Comments

[archaeologist-d.livejournal.com]

There appeared to be some correlation between increasing obesity and use of high-fructose corn syrup (cheaper for manufacturing). Whether that remains the case is up to some debate.

They are using sugar again??? I was told they use it in Europe but I figured the manufacturers here would oppose it because of higher costs. Hummmm.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Limited time, in eighties-era white cans! I am stocking up. It tastes so much better. I'm going to say anecdotally, yeah, the sugar seems to be making a difference.

[transtempts.livejournal.com]

I remember when I stopped drinking soda, it was sort of unreal? I thought 'gosh, no caffeine, etc, and WHAT THE HELL?'

*pets you*

Of course I run, bike, or do some dance stuff nearly every day..so. Yes, but I know what you mean.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

DDR3 is my drug of choice. I like it because it loads fast enough that I can do a few dances or settle in for the long haul either way. Plus, there is nothing not awesome or hilarious about dancing to Ice Ice Baby. My God.

[airglowsgold.livejournal.com]

i have no idea if this has been scientifically validated or not, but corn syrup seems to contribute more to weight-gain than sugar; my dad works at a mammoth food manufacturing and distribution company that employs a lot of mexicans, and one of them came back from a family visit with a couple 24-packs of coke for him (mexican and canadian cola uses sugar), and i lost three pounds drinking it before we ran out and switched back to the american stuff

chemicals are weird. eh, stick w/ the sugared pepsi, sugar's probably not that much less processed than corn syrup but every little bit counts, right? also, you've convinced me to try pick up a ddr for ps2, if that and bikram yoga turn me into some type of freakish skinny muscled creature i'm blaming you

[seperis.livejournal.com]

THE VIDEOS ARE HILARIOUS.

I tripped twice during the first viewing of Hungry Like the Wolf with WTF IS THAT WHAT. Oh eighties. You were so stoned. I hope. If you did that shit clean and sober, IDEK.

[macbyrne.livejournal.com]

I think the more refined the complex carbs are, the easier they stick and the harder they are to lose. So with that being said, sugar would be less refined than say, fructose or sucrose (corn syrup) and so would be lost easier.

I think.... LOL.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I feel this is something I blocked out of chemistry class and wish I hadn't. Stupid complex molecule things.

[margi-lynn.livejournal.com]

Yes, sugar's composition is completely different from corn-syrup!

Corn syrups are way less sweet than any amount of sugar, however they are also cheaper. Also the hidden calorie part applies as well - you're not tasting the compound that makes up the syrup part of the corn sweetener but oh is your body!

Way more corn syrup must go into a can of coke than equivalent refined sugar. That is honestly how much cheaper high-fructose corn syrup is.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sad sense. And God, it tastes so much better. The only thing that comes close is simple syrup which I thought was kind of amazing in that they brought it to the table at a restaurant and it was good in my coffee and my pancakes. That my friend is a useful, useful thing to have around.

[opusnone.livejournal.com]

of note, with Passover coming up, all Coca Cola products certified Kosher for Passover (not just regular Kosher) are made with sugar rather then corn syrup as corn is prohibited during the holiday. If their products are your thing it might make sense to stock up.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

You know, there are several stores here that are Kosher-heavy. I need to check them out more closely.

[zeenell]

i love pepsi throwback so much.

Like, I have this obsession with mt dew, and the only thing i like equally well is pepsi throwback.

(regular pepsi, I am very - if it's there, but otherwise no about)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Regular pepsi just sucks in commparison. I had one and almost spit it out the other day after I'd been drinking the throwback.

[disbelief11.livejournal.com]

Let me just say that I used to think I had some sort of Serious Problem with being Obsessed With Food. I ate and ate and was still hungry...I would just have finished eating and would be so damn hungry minutes later.

...then I started cutting out HFCS and other stuff with weird names I can't pronounce. I haven't cut them out entirely (it's amazing how much stuff has HFCS in it - including my favorite mustard) but within a very short time of cutting back I noticed that I was no longer spending every waking minute thinking about what I could eat next. I could decide that I was full and done. It was like a miracle.

[wrenlet.livejournal.com]

I found HFCS in my saltines *cries*

[ratcreature]

I remember reading about a study with mice, in which some were fed sugar water, some fructose water, some water with artificial sweetener and some plain water. They found that both groups of mice getting calories from their water ate less solid food, so overall all mice ate about the same calories, but the mice drinking the fructose water still got fatter, whereas the sugar water drinking mice didn't. They found the liver affected my too much fructose, and suspected that it aversely affected their metabolism.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I need to find that study. That's--unsettling and fascinating.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I bring SCIENCE!

Yes, sucrose (="table sugar") is made up of two simple sugars, glucose and fructose. Fructose is of course the simple sugar enhanced in HFCS, though HFCS also includes simple glucose.

The important point is: your cells only directly eat the simple sugars. In order to get calories out of sucrose, your body has to invest energy to break the two component sugars apart. The simple sugars (monosaccharides) in HFCS can go directly to GO, no intermediate steps, so they translate into calories very quickly and directly.

I also suspect that because you've gotten used over the years to consuming much more simple sugar than sucrose, your body has become "rusty" at breaking the sucrose apart into its components. If you mostly eat/drink sugar in the form of sucrose, over time your body will become more efficient at metabolizing it again, and your weight will go up.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*thinks* I still drink a lot of sugar, but only in coffee and tea. Though since the new sensitivity to certain kinds of coffee, I'm limited since I can't drink it socially at people's houses nearly as often unless I know the brand. Weirdly, the higher the cost per pound, the better I tolerate it. I keep staring at the cat-coffee with a growing sense of horror that this could be my future.

[cpt-untouchable.livejournal.com]

There's increasing evidence to suggest that high fructose corn syrup (which is added to so many processed foods it's unreal) has a lot to do with the obesity epidemic in America. And ... now I'm going to be such a killjoy I kinda want to pre-emptively punch myself in the face. A study has linked pancreatic cancer with soda. Specifically, women who drink more than two sodas a week. It's something to do with the high sugar content. Artificial sugar is actually worse, though. Aspartame is being linked more and more frequently with brain cancer. It's in a lot of sugar-free and low-cal foods, including most chewing gum.

Yay! Whole foods.

[margi-lynn.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... yes and people who have lots of Aspartame can actually induce PKU in themselves which is not fun!

You have to be careful with meats, any small amount of aspartame will give you horrible headaches that not even opiates will touch, and I have a really mild form!

http://www.pku.com/What-is-PKU/pku-facts-information.php

[sidara.livejournal.com]

there's a lot of scientific data coming out now in regards to HFCS and the links it has to obesity and other issues. like other people said, simple sugars are easier for your body to break down. i'm actually morbidly fascinated about all this stuff. it's crazy where you can find HFCS. i've found it in whole wheat bread and salsa before. it's literally almost everywhere.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I need to find that simple syrup I had at a restaurant in Chicago now. It surprised me that I didn't seem to need nearly as much for my coffee as sugar either.

[kickair8p.livejournal.com]

A couple years ago I was diagnosed mildly diabetic (metabolic syndrome) and given a pretty green blood sugar meter. Best diet aid ever! With that I could see which foods did what in hours instead of weeks/months. What I learned: nothing raises my blood sugar higher or keeps it up there longer than high-fructose corn syrup. All processed corn products were bad for it, but corn syrup's the worst.

I stopped eating all corn except for the occasional corn-on-the-cob or taco shell -- then I stopped getting the heart palpitations and panic attacks that led to the diagnosis. Oh, and I lost eighty pounds.

~

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

AFAIK the body processes HFCS and sugar pretty much the same. The difference is, HFCS is almost always a mark of a more highly processed food, and more highly processed foods are going to tend - on average - to be more junk food-tastic, and going to tend to have other highly processed ingredients that can contribute to binging.

Maybe you're more satisfied by the taste of the sugar (vs HFCS), and over the course of the rest of the day eating a little less of other stuff. But as far as I've read, the link between HFCS and obesity has more to do with the fact that - if you're eating more HFCS than average, you're necessarily eating more processed foods. The body does process different sugars (fructose, sucralose, etc) slightly differently, but the difference between two full sugar sodas (even if one is HFCS and the other is cane sugar)... with likely identical calorie counts (both coming from simple carbohydrates)... well, it's likely to be a placebo affect more than some magical property of cane sugar.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

The difference is, HFCS is almost always a mark of a more highly processed food, and more highly processed foods are going to tend - on average - to be more junk food-tastic, and going to tend to have other highly processed ingredients that can contribute to binging.

This has actually made more sense to me than anything else in these debates, which I've followed closely.

I don't want to compare because a) personal anecdotes are statistically useless, and b) we're talking apples and oranges in too many ways. On a purely emotional level, it's still striking to see all my also-European peers who have been socialised to eat no processed food and drink no or very little soft-drinks and who, despite loving food, are not overweight, despite spanning a spectrum of genetic body shapes.

[fragilistikal.livejournal.com]

I actually just made a post (http://fragilistikal.livejournal.com/126277.html) the other day about my discoveries about sugar and HFCS, and all the hubub.

It was from watching this lecture (http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717) at the UCSF campus by an endocrinologist who breaks everything down for you. It's a pretty fascinating watch, and it may or may not put you off the sugar in general.

[concinnity.livejournal.com]

According to Martha Stewart, simple syrup is sugar and water: http://www.marthastewart.com/article/simple-syrup

There is a lot of science that says HFCS is bad for you. Mind you, a lot of it is bad science, but some of it isn't. And if you eat/drink a fair bit of it every day, well...at best I'd say the jury is definitely still out.

For my tastebuds, food without it tastes better almost 100% of the time. Like, have you had homemade chocolate peanut butter cups with organic everything and no preservatives? They are worth.the.effort. *drools*

Things I learned from Boston Legal

[ariadne83]

Yeah, high-fructose corn syrup contributes to weight gain. It interferes with the body's ability to tell when it's had enough to eat, among other things.

[tricksterquinn.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, I don't think we've ever discussed physique (or have we? I must've kvetched at some point...) but wow do I get what you are talking about.

Also, WOW were the comments on this post fascinating. I don't drink soda at all, don't really enjoy "sweet", and have crazy blood sugar stuff so I always watch my HFCS intake anyway (also, I tend to work hard to eat a majority real, not-chemicaly, food), so this is pretty outside my experience, but very interesting!!

[theeverdream.livejournal.com]

Re: tea
Could you make it in large batches at home and bring some to work in a travel bottle? (Granted if you drink it hot it might take pretty much the same time to microwave it, so that wouldn't be helpful at all.)

[hellpenguin.livejournal.com]

there's also coca-cola made in Mexico. It comes only in the classic glass bottles, but it's made with cane sugar not corn syrup.

[npkedit.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Kosher for Passover thing is totally true. It actually drives those who observe Passover crazy (like yours truly) because Ashkenazic Jews can't have anything with corn syrup in it over the holiday and so it's a total fight to buy up the Kosher for Passover Coke and Pepsi before the non-Jewish sugar brigade gets to it. In NY, I've seen fights break out over soda.

[welfycat.livejournal.com]

Over the past year I've cut out soda from my intake almost completely (I drink maybe one soda once every two or three months now), and what I finally found as a replacement was juice. It's tasty, and it actually has vitamins and stuff in it (I'm not so good about eating fruits and vegetables, so this is a plus) and you can either make it from frozen and keep a pitcher in the fridge, or get bottles/boxes of it for travel. And, I've discovered that I really prefer the taste to soda as well. Win/win.

[ineptshieldmaid.livejournal.com]

Holy glod. *adds to list of Reasons Not To Move To The US*

I only just figured out in the last month or so that not all sugar in the world comes from cane, and now I'm very, very glad to have grown up in a cane-sugar-saturated country.

[apatheia-jane.livejournal.com]

heh, me too. Australian, & I was aware that in Europe sugar might come from beets, but sugar coming from corn was a surprise.

[snowrose.livejournal.com]

Answer from what I remember of my Anatomy/Physiology class. The sugar molecules exert an osmotic pressure and pulls water into the intestines which is then excreted by the body. (I'm no doubt traveling into the realm of TMI, but you perhaps your stool is looser than normal?) Anyway the point is your not really loosing any "real weight"--just "water weight" (so you're probably dehydrated! Drink more water!)

[terialk.livejournal.com]

From a purely biochemical perspective (haven't read any other replies yet), my initial answer is this. As a current biology major, I'm a bit nitpicky with terminology (please forgive orz), so when you say sugar, you mean table sugar, i.e. sucrose. Fructose is also a sugar, if we strictly go by definition that a sugar is a carbohydrate. The chemical difference in structure is that fructose is a monosaccharide (a single unit), which can be readily converted by the body into glucose, the form cells like to metabolize. On the other hand, sucrose is a disaccharide made of fructose + glucose, so the body expends more energy to metabolize it. Instead of just converting fructose -> glucose, cells now have to break the bond between fructose and glucose, as well as convert the now free molecule of fructose -> glucose. So in a way, it takes you more energy to burn a molecule of sucrose than fructose.

However, I will note that high-fructose corn syrup [HFCS] (not crystalline fructose) is usually equal parts glucose and fructose since companies like not telling people that corn syrup = glucose. =_= Special people, really. A sugar is a sugar is a sugar except in how much energy it gives the body and how much energy it requires the body to metabolize it. There is variability because HFCS comes in different grades (they do mix it with water sometimes because they are cheap) so high grade HFCS has more calories than sucrose per gram, but low grade HFCS has somewhat less.

Another take is that the body actively regulates sucrose metabolism, so the body can to a certain extent control the rate of sugar absorption by cells. With fructose and glucose, they both get converted to their respective "useful" forms and enter glycolysis, the first step of major metabolism in a cell. Sucrose gets converted into fructose and glucose by the enzyme sucrase, and the rate of conversion is then fixed by how fast the enzyme can work (there are actually many enzymes called "sucrase"). But yeah, tl;dr -> sucrose costs the body more time and probably more energy to metabolize than HFCS (depending on the grade).

[terialk.livejournal.com]

In general, I'd recommend drinking more water to flush out your system though. There have been a few studies linking increased chance of diabetes with HFCS diets vs. sucrose diets. My friend was doing a paper on obesity research last week so... >_> [As a really horribly side note of possibly way too much information, I think it has to do with causing leptin resistance, which is of the bad ;_;. Leptin is a key hormone like insulin dealing with metabolism.)