Hello from the Pacific Northwest! I’m spending the week out here on a wacky road-trip with my parents that started with my cousin’s wedding in Walla Walla, WA, and now has us up in Vancouver, Canada (by way of Seattle and Portland). The short version of the story is that we all used to live out here, so we have tons of family and friends we want to visit. We’ve also, evidently, forgotten how incredibly far away everything is from everything else. This means we’re seeing lots of gorgeous landscape and–because we’re perpetually underestimating travel time–a good 75% of our diet has been cobbled together from what’s selling at gas station mini-marts. Packaged food central.
All this to say that when I came across this new study from Princeton University, it struck a chord: Consuming the same amounts of sugar and high fructose corn syrup don’t result in the same amount of weight gain. Eating HFCS (basically, the sweetener you get in most commercial sodas, ketchups, candies, cookies, and salad dressings–stuff I’ve been seeing a lot of lately) will make you a whole lot fatter.
In the study, which was supported by the U.S. Public Health Service, rats were given either sugar or high fructose corn syrup. The HFCS-consuming animals not only gained a full 48% more weight–pretty bad stuff already–but they also accumulated those new pounds around their belly and had higher levels of circulating blood fats (triglycerides).
“Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” lead author Bart Hoebel, a Princeton psychology professor specializing the the neuroscience of appetite, said in a statement. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”
This study didn’t explore why HFSC was so much worse for you, but other research has suggested it’s connected to the way the stuff is manufactured. Regular sugar (and, while I’m at it here’s another reason to opt-in for a little) contains bound molecules of fructose and glucose, so your body has to delay absorption in order to break apart the bonds. The factory processing that HFCS undergoes, by contrast, means that the fructose and glucose are already separated when they enter your system, so they can be absorbed into your bloodstream more quickly.
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Camille