You Asked for It, Patrick vs. HFCS

A number of people have asked me to weigh in on High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) and the debate that was stirred up a few months ago when the following ads were played all over the US. The Corn Refiners Association produced three of these commercials and we're just going to take our time and work our way through them, and calmly look at the facts. Ok, number 1.

HFCS "Party" Commercial (note that the Corn Refiners Association won't allow YouTube embeds anymore, probably a response to posts just like this, so you'll have to open with a new window and watch on YouTube. Do it, it's worth it!)

What an uncomfortable thing to watch. Don't you just feel like these two women are brimming with barely constrained rage? I thought someone was about to get slapped. Anyway, on to the substance of the ad.

The setting, a kids party, and by the table full of presents and balloons in the background I'd say it's safe to assume a birthday party. The food product, the ubiquitous "grape drink". Concerned mom is worried the HFCS isn't good for the kids, but when pressed can't explain why. Chill mom explains it's natural, the same thing as sugar, and no big deal. Everyone's happy.

Let's break it down:

Everything said in this commercial is true. HFCS comes from a natural source, corn, and is basically the same as sugar. There's been a lot of studies on this and there's just no evidence that HFCS damages the body in any specific way. (There's always a new study coming out, most recently that HFCS contains mercury, but I think that kind of stuff is all a distraction. If you study anything enough you'll find something unhealthy in it, and it usually only kicks in if you imagine someone consuming gallons and gallons of the stuff in a day) For all intents and purposes, it's sugar. Cheap, liquid sugar that the food industry loves because of it's ease of use and long shelf-life. So I can see the Corn Refiners Association's point. Why is their product being vilified when it's just another form of sugar?

Here's the crux. ...and like sugar it's fine in moderation. Again, very true. But let's get down and dirty with the numbers a bit.

The consumers of this beverage will be young children. The American Heart Association recommends that kids have between 6 and 9 teaspoons of sugar a day at most. I couldn't track down the exact dietary information for "Grape Drink", but I'd say it's safe to assume it has around the same sugar content as a soda. A 12 ounce can of soda has 10-13 teaspoons of sugar in it, depending on the brand. So it's reasonable to assume 6 oz. of soda or grape drink would have just about a full days worth of sugar for a child. And it appears chill mom is pouring a portion equivalent to that in the punch glasses.

Are you seeing the problem here? For a child at that party to have, as chill mom recommends, a moderate amount of sugar, they would have to drink that one glass as their only sugar intake for the whole day. No refills. No sweets. Also, no cereal, fruit, or fruit juice for breakfast that morning, no bread, no condiments, nothing for the rest of the day that contains naturally occurring or added sugar. Can you imagine? "Sorry honey, you can't have any of Susie's birthday cake, we're eating sugar in moderation and you had that grape drink a half hour ago so it's just celery sticks for you!" And yet that is exactly what chill mom says she does by keeping things "in moderation." Fascinating.

Ok, on to the even more cringeworthy clip 2:

HFCS "Two Bites" Commerical.

A tranquil park or university quad, a young couple having a picnic. The guy is worried the popsicle has HFCS, his ladyfriend assures him it's no different than sugar in moderation. Guy is so relieved he yanks it out of her hand and asks if she brought two. Ha ha that was an awkward moment in our relationship but now life is great.

Obviously all the same arguments made for the first ad apply here, but this time they're bringing in the idea that it's the calories that are the same between sugar and HFCS. Again, all accurate. (What's ironic is that in both the first and second commercial they're reassuring people about the same product. In the first commercial it's colored sugar water in its liquid form, and this is the frozen variation. All these people sure do like their sugar, they're not even dressing it up.) Anyway, if it's calories you want to talk about, we can do that.

This guy seems of average height and build, in his early 20s. If he has a sedentary life like most modern people he will need to consume 1800 calories a day to maintain his weight. One of those popsicles will come in at around 100 calories. So, because of this unexpected highly sweetened frozen water snack, this guy has put himself 100 calories above and beyond his usual caloric intake. The question is, will he keep that in mind as he goes about his day? 100 calories is about what you'd get in a can of light beer. That night, will he say to his girlfriend, "You know what, I just remembered I ate that popsicle at the park, so I'm going to pass on the Bud Light, I'll just have a water." Maybe he will. But lets look at a still from that video:

A young man in the prime of life will not have a double chin and jowls unless something is seriously out of balance with his diet. (I'm sorry to pick on this actor like this, hey HFCS actor, if you contact us we'll give you a free PCP. Maybe you'll get better roles. I'm serious, get in touch!) Somewhere this guy is getting a bunch of extra calories. I'd hazard a guess that he's not consuming his sugar in moderation as his girlfriend suggests. A HFCS laden popsicle is the last thing he needs. And I thought she loved him.

On to our final adventure in bizzaro-earth, where everyone loves talking about corn syrup:

HFCS "Breakfast" Commercial.

Breakfast table, big brother freaks about the HFCS, little brother assures him it's just like sugar, and big brother just can't contain himself and rips the bowl out of his hands.

At least it's a "food" this time and not sugar water. This ad's variation is that it's nutritionally the same as sugar. That's quite correct. They both have absolutely no nutritional content whatsoever. The little brother could also have said, "it's a big chunk of completely empty calories that provides nothing my body needs, just like sugar!" Ah, cereal.

How much HFCS is in this stuff exactly? The ad features some kind of box that resembles Kellogg's Rasin Bran, so lets use that as our base. The little brother appears to have poured himself a two cup serving of cereal. According to the label that's 35.2 grams of sugar (HFCS), which works out to about seven and a half teaspoons of sugar. A teenage boy should consume no more than 13 teaspoons of sugar a day. So before he has even left the house the little brother has blown half of his daily sugar. He could have one of those cups of grape drink from the first ad and he'd be at stretching the upper range of what it means to be "just fine in moderation." Again, no more sugar means no bread, no yogurt, no ketchup or tomato sauce, no fruit or fruit juice, no desserts, no more sugar, period. You think he'll make it through the day without slipping up on his promise to be moderate?

Let me just say for the record that there are few breakfasts worse than a bowl of cereal, even the healthy stuff. You need real food, (read protein, vegetables and fruit) to get you through an active day. A bowl of cereal is a bowlful of empty carbs and sugar. By ten a.m. you'll be hungry again, with a vending machine full of HFCS calling out to you. The big brother was on the right track for calling out what a crappy breakfast his doofus sibling is eating.

As you can see now, the problem with HFCS is that it is slowly creeping into more and more food and drinks. And while, as the Corn Refiners Association points out again and again, it is a "natural" product (just like those other wholesome substances, heroin and cocaine) we're eating far too much of it. Each of these ads inadvertently telegraphs that none of the characters is truly eating HFCS in moderation. The Western diet has forgotten what a moderate amount of sugar even looks like. How do you eat something in moderation if it's in one-third of all processed foods?

There's only one answer here, and that is of course to stop eating processed foods. A diet based on fresh vegetables, whole grains, and fruit, prepared at home will by definition not contain a drop of HFCS. It won't even be an issue.

And this is the true irony of these ads. Suppose the audience actually listened to the Corn Refiners Association's chiding, and started consuming HFCS in moderation. Suddenly, a gallon of grape drink would last a family for a month. Popsicles would be replaced by apples. People would switch to non-sugared cereals. If the public really followed the advice presented here, the Corn Refiners Association would, in fact, put itself out of business.

The refining conglomerates know that they're safe though, because here's the bitter surprise; most people don't have the facts, don't know how to get ahold of the facts, and will only get fatter and sicker by continuing to over-consume sugar, whether in it's old fashioned cane or newfangled HFCS. And these companies will be happy to continue adding the stuff into your food all the way to your grave.

I don't have a million dollar ad budget like them, so it's up to you to pass this on to someone who needs the real facts. With education, these ads look as ridiculous as the tobacco ads from the 50's, and just as detrimental to your and your loved ones' health.

Stop Bean Counting!

If you've ever had a conversation with me about health you'll know that I absolutely detest applying any kind of number to the body. Weight, BMI, Fat %, Muscle Mass, I couldn't care less. Sometimes we have to use these during the PCP to get a general picture of a participant's condition, but I try to avoid the top line of the keyboard at all costs.

Human beings are incredibly good at bean counting. It satisfies us in some way to take this complex world and break it down into digestible digits. Alan Watts, as usual, explained this better than I ever could in a lecture entitled "Seeing Through the Net":

"But nature itself is clouds, it’s water, it’s the outline of continents, it’s mountains, it’s biological existences, and all of them wiggle, and wiggly things are, to human consciousness, a little bit of a nuisance. Because we want to figure it out.

And it is as if, therefore, some ancient fisherman one day held up his net, and looked at the world through the net. And he said, 'My, just think of that: there, I can see the view; and that is one—that peak of that mountain is one two three four five six holes across; and the base is one two three four five holes down. Now I’ve got its number!' See?

And so, the lines of latitude and longitude, the lines of celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, the whole idea of a matrix, of looking at things through graph paper painted or printed on cellophane, is the basic idea of measurement. This is the way we calculate. We break down the wiggly-ness of the world comprehensible, countable, geometrical units, and thereby figure it and construct it in those terms.

And this is so successful—up to a point—that we can, of course, come to imagine that this is the way the physical world really is. Discrete, discontinuous, full of points, in fact a mechanism. But I want just to put into you mind the notion that this may be the prejudice of a certain personality type."

Your body is a 100% natural specimen. Every single function that keeps you alive and regulated obeys the rules of nature, not mechanics. We are completely analog creatures. We are harmonic wave patterns. Your heartbeat, metabolism, sleep patterns, circulation, immune function, and everything else your body does to keep you alive is a series of cycles. Oscillating, maddeningly organic cycles that defy interference from our measly attempts to change them by plugging in some new numbers.

I could go on forever about this, but the number I want to talk about in this post is that of calories. Most people are so conditioned to the term Calorie that they've lost all sense of what a calorie is. Do YOU know what a calorie is? Don't run off to Google, just sit there and ask yourself, what is a calorie? Most people have a vague sense that a calorie is the amount of "foodness" in a particular food. And that too many of them are bad. It's as if in the magical food factory the scientists fill up scones and fudgecicles with calorie units, and then when they're all full they put them in boxes and ship them to the store. Calories become a way to numerically pin down a food, just as the fisherman was able to chop up the view with his net.

For once and for all, here's what a calorie unit is:

A calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise 1 kg of water from a heat of 0 to 1 degree celcius.

Underwhelmed? You should be. A calorie is just a way of talking about energy. In fact, the word calorie was originally used to talk about the heat output of engines. Can you imagine saying to someone, "My new motorcycle has a 90,000 calorie engine?" You could very well do that. It wasn't until the mid 20th century that calories became so closely tied to food. (I'm going to skip the science here but if you really want to know how it all breaks down follow this link) So, clearly your body needs a certain amount of energy (Calories) to get through the day. We get this energy through food. Enough food, enough energy, not enough food, you get a deficit, too much food, you have a surplus.

If you consume too much energy in a given day, the body will say, "thank you very much" and store that extra energy as fat. And it will do this forever and ever as long as the extra energy is coming in. It's working on an ancient pattern that all the diet pill makers in the world can never override. A few years of doing this consistently will do amazing things to the body.

If you don't consume enough energy the body will turn to its storage units of muscle and fat and break them down to get the power it needs. And it'll keep doing this until every last bit of muscle and fat is gone, and then it'll go after the organs. And only when every last scrap of energy is gone will the body fail (dehydration usually gets to it first) Don't want to bum you out, but here's how amazing the body's ability to change and adapt is:

It's all about how much energy is entering the system. But far too many people take this knowledge and run with it in the wrong direction. They become Calorie counters. They figure out that they burn X many Calories in a day and if they eat Y amount of Calories they'll get Z effect.

But here's the important point. Your stomach is not like an ATM. You are not digital. The body evolved over millions of years to be adaptable and to set up systems which further survival at all costs. This means that you can screw up your Calorie intake in major ways and still chug along for a good 40 years of ill-health, low energy, and dissatisfaction with your body.

What I try to encourage people to do is stop asking "how many calories are in this food?" and move towards, "how much energy is in this food?" This little change has big effects. It frees you from the nagging guilt you feel when you have a high Calorie, "bad" food.

For example, you've had lunch, and you'd like a little something sweet to finish the meal. You have the choice of a pear, or a slice of lemon meringue pie. Usual diet thinking will steer you away from the "bad" choice of pie and towards the healthy choice of the pear. But we all know the second you're told something is forbidden it becomes all the more tempting, and soon the mind will throw up the usual litany of rationalizations:

"You deserve it, you finally finished that project! It's like a celebration!"
"You can just have a lighter dinner tonight, it'll be fine!"
"Life's short, enjoy the little things!"

If you approach it as a sinful yet scrumptious high Calorie food, usually the pie wins.

Let's rewind that situation and sub in the word energy for Calorie. The pear is a low energy food. It's mostly water. The pie is a very high energy food, it packs quite a punch into its little slice. You've just had a good lunch. Your body is full of energy. Looking at the rest of your day, you have a little office work to do, some errands, nothing that would require a ton of extra energy. So the pie energy will mosy likely be unused, and the body will gladly take that excess, transform it to fat cells and distribute it all over your body. We've got enough fat cells as it is, so the low energy pear makes a lot more sense. Pie sure is yummy, but it's unneeded energy. One pear coming up.

Did you see how there were no good guys or bad guys in that situation? Just you figuring out which choice is best for your energy needs.

Sometimes people come back with, "Yes, but by that logic I could skip lunch, eat two slices of pie, and still be ok because I met my energy needs." That's true! Why don't you try it? I'm serious! Have pie for lunch today. It won't make you fatter.

You'll quickly find that high energy foods alone don't make you feel very good. Delivering energy to the body is huge bursts upsets your digestion, mood, and mental function. And of course over time, without the nutrients that come from unprocessed natural low energy foods, your body will start to have debilitating deficiencies.

Thinking about the energy in foods will gradually point you towards nourishing and natural foods. If you've only got a certain amount of energy you can consume in a day, you simply don't want to blow it all on chocolate bars and potato chips. You want more bang for your energy buck. And this will all happen without you having to consult a list of numbers or nutrition labels artificially imposed on your diet.

Eating doesn't have to be a stressful math problem of Calories consumed - minutes on the treadmill + guilt of indulging - rationalizations and promises to do better tomorrow.

By thinking in terms of energy, not numbers, food can become a simple pleasure, just like it was for the hundreds of thousands of years before science held the net up to it.