high fructose corn syrup

If your goal is to lose weight then the calories are what count. Everything else is individual choice.

Obviously, for health and good nutrition it pays to think about individual foods as part of the bigger picture of meeting your nutritional goals but there’s no need to demonise any specific food or ingredient as far as weight loss itself is concerned.

Some foods will satiate you less initially, or for less long, or will appeal to you less, or more, because of taste, smell or texture, or a combination of all of the above that can change from time to time and as the years go by.

Some foods are more healthy for "reasons".

Including imagined such as "I can't pronounce this name even though years of research studies have shown no issue with unpronounceable consumed in quantities 10x higher than I would ever consume it".

Including real: "research studies have shown that eating charred smoked meat could increase my risk of cancer but it still tastes too good for me to not consume it and I am going to talk myself into believing that such as small increase in risk is not relevant to me".

Including real: "eating more than 5x 85g of fruits and vegetables a day has additional health benefits"

Including believed to not be real: "even though multiple heart and stroke foundations throughout the world consider coconut oil to be saturated and something to be limited for health, dr. percola and blog bobcola have convinced me that medium chain triglycerides are all good so I am going to coat my breakfast drink cup with coconut oil and repel bullets".

And all this doesn't matter for weight loss beyond the contribution it makes to you being able to achieve the caloric balance that you need to in order to in turn achieve the reasonably defined goals you've set.

Is it "better" to achieve the caloric balance you need to in a "healthy" manner?
Why not?
I sure as heck don't try to eat "unhealthily" by preference!

but if my preoccupation with eating healthily detracts me from my overall goals I remind myself that the large base of my pyramid and the foundation that got me to, and will keep me at, "normal weight" is appropriate caloric balance. Sure, all the extra olive oil I consumed while morbidly obese was healthy to eat. But I wasn't.

That said, I personally prefer to blow my calories on chocolate, not mayo. Mayo, for me, is calorically expensive and easily substituted or omitted. but if you likes and can affords it--I won't judge!

OP, I'm in with the majority here: Fructose, including HFCS, is not some kind of magical poison such that eating some sometimes is nutritionally evil, and certainly it's the calories that matter directly for weight management. Sure, if someone were silly enough - which I'm sure you aren't - to eat the majority of their calories as pure fructose, their energy level would eventually tank due to under-nutrition (i.e., they'd burn fewer calories), and their satiation might suffer (so they'd eat even more fructose, so more calories). Those are indirect effects on weight, but obviously negative.

In particular, Lemurcat's succinct post summarizes my view exactly. Overall good nutrition is what matters. Avoiding actual poisons and personal allergens is also a good plan.

HFCS is not an actual poison, especially not when considered independent of context and dosage.

antigymrat wrote: »

It's not the high fructose corn syrup that is the problem - it's the processed food that's the problem.

IMO, there's a lot of fuzzy thinking and popular folklore around this question.

I'm speculating here, but nutritionally, it's maybe a sub-ideal plan to center one's eating on foods that have had lots of ingredients taken out of them, then those extracted things are recombined with other things that are also extractives or synthesized ingredients.

My thought process, saying that, has at least 3 bases:

1. Over my lifetime, because I'm old, science has "discovered" quite a few essential or beneficial nutrients (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, other useful phytochemicals, etc.). Before those were discovered, they tended to be ignored, possibly extracted and discarded, when formulating processed foods, because they were perceived as useless matter. They were in basic foods - foods humans had eaten for centuries - all along. My guess would be that we're not done with such discoveries yet, so eating a fair fraction of traditional foods seems like a decent nutritional bet-hedge, to me, to keep getting those yet-undiscovered beneficials.

2. From a weight management perspective, there's limited evidence that eating relatively more of so-called "whole foods" might be helpful.

Specifically, there's at least one tiny, preliminary study I've read, hinting that whole foods may have a higher TEF than highly-processed/refined foods: That means those foods may require more energy (calories) to digest and metabolize the nutrients in them, as compared to more refined, processed foods, which may make those nutrients bioavailable at a lower energy (calorie) cost to release them.

In addition, there's some research and a fair bit of MFP folkloric anecdote suggesting that many people find many so-called "whole foods" more filling than many highly processed foods. That part is likely to be individual and subjective, but it's at least a reason IMO for people to experiment with decreasing highly processed foods and increasing simpler traditional foods, when trying to lose weight, to see if it helps them with satiation.

3. Unknowns related to gut microbiome. I'm following gut microbiome research casually, but with interest, and cautiously. There are a lot of BS claims about it right now in popular-"health" sources, claims that I think aren't well-justified by the actual state of research.

It does seem that our gut microbiome - which is several pounds of microbes in our digestive tract that isn't even genetically "us" - is important to our well-being in some way(s), and that a diverse microbiome of "good" microbes is relevant. The problem is that we don't know much, yet, IMU, about what "good" means, or exactly how all of this works or what-all it does.

There does seem to be a correlation between eating plenty of veggies/fruits specifically, and maybe whole foods generally, and having a diverse gut microbiome; and a correlation between eating a narrow range of highly processed foods, and a less diverse gut microbiome. I haven't seen, in my reading, that we know much more than that, yet . . . and I may be reaching a bit even in saying that much.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that eating diverse whole foods can be a good bet-hedge toward beneficial gut microbiome, whatever that turns out to be.

I don't see a down-side to eating a good range of so-called whole foods, and there may be benefits . . . but I may feel that way in part because I do find veggies, fruits, grains, etc., really tasty and filling.

I don't buy the argument that eating any highly-processed foods at all, ever, is destructive to health, or prevents getting reasonably adequate nutrition. I'm open to arguments, though (not here - take it to the Debate Club area).

Bridgie3 wrote: »

HFCS is something like 70% fructose and 30% glucose. Fructose is digested in the liver by turning it into triglycerides and creating a fatty droplet. about 20% of it is made available to your body to use for energy and the rest is stored, so you can eat fructose and be hungry quite soon after, because your body went and stored it all. Having said that it's good for athletes. long story.

Glucose is mostly set free in the blood to be used as energy and maybe 20% gets stored as glycogen in the liver. Glycogen is non toxic and you can store as much as you like, it's what your brain needs. If there's too much glucose floating around in the blood, your body produces insulin to help it enter cells and either be used, or be stored as fat.

As a type 2 diabetic I avoid hfcs like the plague, but understand that normal corn syrup is much higher in glucose (lower in fructose) and is absolutely fine... for a non diabetic.

I would never recommend anyone consume any HFCS. It's bad news.

Beware of the sugar fights around here. There are some people very invested in the pre-'sugar myth' discoveries of, what 2010? I get a lot of flak on this site for recommending anyone ever avoid it, or suggesting they eat fat instead; but fat is a safe food product which doesn't trigger insulin and provides enormous satiety. We've been metabolising it for maybe a million years and our bodies are good at it. HFCS not so much.

Factually incorrect on so many levels.

James Krieger sums it up - "“The only practical difference between sucrose and HFCS is in the bonding. The glucose & fructose in HFCS is mainly free and unbonded, while it is bonded in sucrose. However, this makes no *meaningful* difference in regards to metabolism in the body. The bonds in sucrose are quickly broken when sucrose hits the acid environment of the stomach. This means that once sucrose hits the stomach, it’s no different from HFCS. Once you get to the small intestine, metabolism is *exactly* the same. This *little bit of difference* does not lead to the problems Dr. Lustig talks about. The fact is, HFCS and sucrose are identical as far as your body is concerned. The difference in bonding wouldn’t make a shred of difference in regards to your health.”"

If someone wants to delve deeper - https://weightology.net/should-you-be-afraid-of-fructose/


A more fun fact about fructose....
Endurance athletes (you know, those typically lean poeple!) often use sports drinks with a mix of glucose and fructose to raise the maximum level of carb intake while exercising from c. 60g an hour to 90g an hour to boost their glycogen (not fat!) production.

Bridgie3 wrote: »

HFCS is something like 70% fructose and 30% glucose.

This is generally inaccurate. There is a form of 70% fructose HFCS, but it a new Japanese product used mostly in some filling jellies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup (follow the links within for more information)

The most common HFCS is that in soda, and that is typically 55% fructose (vs sucrose or table sugar, which is 50%, so not much of a difference). The HFCS used in various other common processed food uses is actually 42% fructose, so even less than sugar.

Both fructose and glucose are typically found in fruits too, in varying percentages, so anyone claim that fructose is some type of scary thing can be ignored. For example, the sugar in a banana is a bit more than 50% fructose.

It is simply false that sugar -- of any sort -- is going to be stored as net fat when you are at a calorie deficit, and, as PAV notes, when you are eating a mixed diet of carbs and fat (as well as protein), it is more common for your body to store fat as fat since it is easier to do so -- when you convert sugar or starch to fat there are calories being burnt in the conversion.

But the bigger issue is just that it is impossible to put on net fat in a calorie deficit -- where would the energy to do that come from?

As far as a little HFCS in the mayo making one hungry vs a mayo without HFCS, it seems unlikely to me, especially since it's a tiny amount and necessarily eaten with other foods, but of course what actually is sating or not is a personal thing. I'd say it's a good rule of thumb that if someone claims to know what does and does not lead to hungry in general, as if humans didn't different on this, that they are at least oversimplifying.

For example, while I am not anti fat (and pretty obviously the vast majority of calls in ANY regular mayo is from fat), studies suggest that for most people fat is the macro with the least satiety effect. I tend to think focus on macros alone for satiety is kind of pointless for most, as for me it's more about food choice and a mix of macros, as well as fiber and volume. But in any case I don't see how the original question has much to do with macros at all, or satiety. I suppose if one thinks everyone should be recommended a low carb diet that's the advice one gives everyone. I think low carb diets can be helpful for some (although that really doesn't even have much to do with HFCS vs other sweeteners in tiny amounts in condiments, unless the carbs are very very low), but I don't personally think it's the right choice for everyone, that it is somehow more healthy than various other ways to eat (although it can be done healthfully), or that trying to scare people about foods like fruit that contain fructose and glucose is actually good nutrition advice.

Anyway, back to OP's question: will HFCS magically prevent weight loss? No. (And re the health advice, worth noting that OP doesn't seem to be contemplating consuming significant amounts of it anyway, as dosage is something worth considering.)