Marion Nestles up to HFCS

The trade group for industrial U.S. corn growers recently asked the FDA for permission to rename High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) as Corn Sugar. As a marketing tact, the Corn Refiners Association acted in its best interest to change the name of a much-maligned product. But what’s less reasonable is when a renowned nutrition, food and politics researcher steps in to defend, well, it's not clear what. It seems that Marion Nestle and Nestle USA (along with nearly every other processed foods company) now have something in common. Namely, they both have been ignoring the emerging facts about HFCS.

Ms. Nestle (to distinguish the NYU professor from the foodstuffs peddlers) writes in the Atlantic:

Let's give the Corn Refiners credit for calling a sugar a sugar. I would prefer "corn sugars" (plural) to indicate that it is a mixture of glucose and fructose. But as long as they don't call it "natural," the change is okay with me.

It’s okay with Nestle, but is it okay for anyone else. Sugar is sugar just like fat is fat and stupidity is stupidity. There are many shades to these simplistic descriptions. Here’s how dramatically sugars can vary:
Sugar Content for Different Sugars (g/100g)

Sugar	Fructose	Glucose	Sucrose
Granulated Sugar	(50)	(50)	100
Brown Sugar	1	1	97
HFCS-42	42	53	0
HFCS-55	55	41	0
HFCS-90	90	5	0
Honey	50	44	1
Maple Syrup	1	4	95
Molasses	23	21	53
Corn Syrup	0	35	0

 This information was drawn from Wikipedia using USDA data.

It may not look like much, but keep your eyes on the sucrose column. Some people refer to sucrose as table sugar because table sugar is 100% sucrose. But this is a misleading synonym. Sucrose is better understood as half fructose and half glucose bound together. This is key. Studies now suggest that ingesting equal parts of fructose and glucose each is not the same as consuming an equal amount of sucrose. In sucrose, the sugars are linked, as if glued. Our bodies have to first un-stick the sucrose sugars, whereas with plain fructose and glucose, the sugar hits more immediately and, potentially, more harmfully.

According to the chart, most HFCS is hardly different than table sugar, unless you’re looking at sucrose levels. And those might make a world of difference, as suggested earlier this year by Princeton researchers. Of course, Ms. Nestle rushed to criticize the Princeton team for exploring differences between the impact of sucrose and other sugars (namely HFCS) in the body. To explain why HFCS made rats fat while table sugar did not, they floated the sucrose theory, which Marion Nestle apparently dismisses.

What are her interests here? Why is she hanging her credibility on the shaky argument that “sugar is sugar”? Will Nestle eventually eat her own words, or will HFCS be vindicated? It's hard to say at this point. But, almost as a rule, industries like the Corn Refiners are in it to win it no matter what science says. What's more concerning is that the aloofness of would-be watchdogs like Marion Nestle might derail the campaign against HFCS, if in fact human studies demonstrate a categorical difference between metabolism of HFCS (and other sucrose-light sugars like honey) and that of sucrose-dense sugars (such as maple syrup and brown sugar). For now, Ms. Nestle continues putting her reputation on the line to ensure a good name for a disputed product.