High Fructose Corn Syrup Adds Fat, Dumbs the Brain and Hides Everywhere
Yes, that’s a scare message we should all note. Nobody deliberately reaches for high fructose corn syrup, but a quick look at ingredients shows it turning up everywhere with the average American consuming 27 pounds of it last year!
Yahoo.com reports University of California Los Angeles researchers mouse research indicated animals that drank high fructose corn syrup took 30 percent longer to get through a maze.
They say fructose disrupts plasticity, the creation of fresh pathways between brain cells that occurs when we learn something new.
How To Get Rid of It
When you are shopping you can weed out a lot of the fructose if you examine the ingredients of products like ketchup, yogurt, cold cereals, bread and butter pickles, maple syrup, fruited cottage cheeses, applesauce, meat marinades, jams and jellies, fruit juice, canned pastas and granola bars.
Quick glimpses show startling differences in similar products. For instance, Vlasic Bread & Butter Spears have as much sugar in them as a handful of M&Ms.
One serving of Breakstone’s Cottage Doubles 100 Calorie Cottage Cheese with Strawberry delivers 10 grams of sugar versus 9 grams of protein.
Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth pancake syrups are essentially high fructose corn syrup with a splash of caramel coloring.
Mott’s Cinnamon Applesauce lists HFCS as its second ingredient–and delivers 24 grams of sugar per serving, exactly what you get in a Twix bar.
Heinz Tomato Ketchup gives you 4 grams of manmade sugary sweetness in just one tablespoon.
The very first ingredient in KC Masterpiece Marinade Honey Teriyaki is high-fructose corn syrup.
Dannon’s Light & Fit Nonfat Banana Yogurt lists fructose as its third ingredient after nonfat milk and water–and ahead of bananas.
With corn syrup, sugar, and molasses all part of its ingredients, Quaker Chewy Granola Caramel Apple Bar offers barely any fiber, but eight grams of sugar. Compare that to a bowl of Quaker Oats, with 4 grams of fiber and just one gram of sugar.
As you check the ingredients and survey the products on the shelf you may find, just as I did, that the sugar lovers in your family all gravitate to the fructose loaded products whenever they are around. They always reach for the sugar loaded ketchups, syrups and canned pastas first if they are available.
Winning the game here means carefully reading the labels and bringing in as much as much fresh fruit and pure juices as possible to retrain everybody’s tastes.
Used under Creative Commons Licensing courtesy of Ly Thien Hoang
