Just walk down the aisle of your grocery store. Check out the ingredients on labels. And you'll see the same thing over and over: High fructose corn syrup is the first ingredient.
It's in pancake syrup, cookies, ketchup, jelly, even cereal and soup.
In a can of soup we picked off the supermarket shelf, high fructose corn syrup is the third ingredient behind tomato and water.
Each year, Americans consume, on average, almost 38 pounds of high fructose corn syrup. But not Jessica Haney. This mother of two and the voice behind a blog called crunchy-chewy-mama has cut the corn-based sweetener out of her family's diet. "It's not just squeezing out the corn and getting the sugar or something. It's not that you're eating corn. It's not like you're eating a vegetable. It's a highly industrialized product that has been shown to do lots of yucky things in your body. And we just don't need it. "
Many Americans are convinced high fructose corn syrup is one of the culprits of the country's obesity epidemic. In a recent study, 57 percent of those polled said it was a top food safety issue, right up there with artificial growth hormones in milk and mad cow disease. That concern is reflected in the demand for food that's free of high fructose corn syrup.
Just check out Pepsi's newest offering, Sierra Mist made with real sugar. "It's the soda nature would drink, if nature drank soda," the ad says.
For all of the bad buzz around high fructose corn syrup, a number of studies suggest there is no difference between how the body responds to it versus plain old sugar. In 2008, the American Medical Association said, "insufficient evidence exists to specifically restrict the use of high fructose corn syrup."
But the issue isn't settled. The AMA also encouraged further "independent research on the health effects of high fructose corn syrup."
We're here at Princeton University because this is where one of the most recent studies, and a very controversial one, on high fructose corn syrup and how it's different than sugar was recently conducted. It's a study that involves rats and it was released just this year.
"Our studies were conducted in a simulated soft drink. It was high fructose corn syrup in water," professor Bart Hoebel said. Hoebel and his team of researchers gave a second group of rats access to regular sugar dissolved in water. The rats drinking the high fructose corn syrup mixture actually consumed fewer calories than those drinking water sweetened with real sugar.
But even so, the team found that the rats consuming the high fructose corn syrup got significantly fatter. "Exactly. And this is what led us to believe that those two are not the same after all," Hoebel said.
Critics of high fructose corn syrup point to Hoebel's research as proof that the body metabolizes it differently than sugar, while some experts criticize the veracity of his findings. Hoebel says more research needs to be done.
As the scientific verdict on high fructose corn syrup remains inconclusive, the Corn Refiners Association, which represents producers of the sweetener, knows it has a public perception issue and is trying to rebrand it as corn sugar.
In addition to this multimillion dollar ad campaign, the Corn Refiners Association has petitioned the FDA to use corn sugar on ingredient labels.
"High fructose corn syrup is simply a sugar made from corn. It is an added sugar in the diet, and this effort to provide clarity to consumers will help them recognize added sugars in the diet," said Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association.
But many skeptical consumers like Haney say high fructose corn syrup by another name is still something she won't be feeding her family. She thinks to change the name is very misleading.
"Oh yeah. I do. We do molasses and honey and maple syrup, things that all have minerals embedded within them, and that come with fiber, whereas the high fructose corn syrup doesn't."
But it would take a lot of Jessica Haneys to eat away at this startling statistic: 38 pounds of high fructose corn syrup per American per year.
