Mysterious Sub Revealed

It always pays to read more about food if you are concerned with your own health and well-being. Science and technology have brought us so much we have no means of learning them all. Despite that, the risk of ignorance can be costly in fact even to your life. The mysterious "un-sub" (unknown substance) we cover this week is one of these.

OUR mysterious substance (sub) in drinks, particularly soft drinks, has no “satiety impact” despite its “being” a carbohydrate, as mentioned in a previous outing in Breakthroughs. That makes us suspect that this substance is not a natural carbohydrate because carbohydrates by nature fill you up.

The substance is not new to me. I often encountered it in labels but never suspected there is something more to it. The name is as innocent as any other simple sugar I encountered during my med-tech days. When I stumbled upon it in studies I reviewed lately, the study results surprised me.

In (food) labels, the substance is called “high fructose corn syrup” (HFCS). The name is really self-explanatory. Fructose simply means “fruit sugar,” the simple sugar found abundantly in fruits. The “corn” pointed to Zea mays as its source, perhaps the sweet corn variety. (Perhaps corn can now be categorized as a “fruit,” you may have observed.) The term “syrup” gets you to think that fructose is simply liquefied through a “laboratory” process, just like any cough syrup you know. “High” simply indicates that this syrup is a concentrated form of fructose.

At times though what appears simple may not be that simple at all.

HFCS is a group of corn syrups that went through reactions with enzymes to convert some of its glucose content into fructose. Being liquid makes it... [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 11 June 2013.

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