Glucose fructose syrup in the Netherlands
The American sweetener HFCS also seems to be on the rise in our country. Although HFCS, or glucose fructose syrup, is made from corn, this does not mean that you can enjoy this natural sweetener indefinitely. What about this corn syrup?
His name was Earl Butz, he was Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and he devised a brilliant plan that would have far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined: He promoted intensive corn cultivation as a mainstay for American farmers, complete with subsidy program.
The explosion of maize cultivation in the US came just as the Japanese Yoshiyuki Takasaki perfected a process by which maize could be enzyme treated into an extraordinarily potent sweetener, which would become known in the US as High Fructose Corn Syrup, abbreviated HFCS. In the Netherlands it is better known as glucose fructose syrup, or corn syrup. An ideal situation: Now, even when the corn market became saturated, there was always a destination for the grain product. After all, HFCS has an almost unlimited shelf life.
The right product at the right time
We are writing the early 1970s and Ancel Keys’ studies were becoming more widely supported. Keys was the physician and researcher who conducted a large quantitative study in the 1950s on the association between the use of saturated fats and the prevention of heart and vascular disease.
Although Keys’s research results have come under increasing criticism (including selectively shopping through his research results to reach his conclusion), the late 1970s was the time when US government agencies began large-scale programs to reduce the use of saturated fats. to discourage.
A matter of taste
This presented the food industry with a problem: when the amount of saturated fat in products was drastically reduced, the taste decreased accordingly. There turned out to be a good reason for eating fat: it just tastes good. But here the puzzle pieces came together wonderfully. The newly developed sweetener HFCS, of which an almost unlimited amount was available at low cost thanks to Butz’s program, proved to be an excellent replacement. Moreover, HFCS was completely unsuspected. Wasn’t HFCS a completely natural product after all? So that couldn’t be wrong!
fructose vs. glucose
HFCS is so called because the sweetening power is largely due to fructose will be delivered. Fructose is approximately 1.7 times sweeter than glucose (although both have the chemical formula C6H12O6, they show a different molecular structure, whereby that of fructose is closer to the taste bud at a molecular level), but glucose and fructose also enhanced each other’s sweetening power. In contrast to sucrose (table sugar) both glucose and fructose are absorbed directly into the bloodstream.
Of course?
In fact, humans are not made for the administration of large amounts of fructose. Although we are evolutionarily equipped to eat fruit, fruit does not contain nearly as much fructose as most people think. Grapes contain about 8 percent and are therefore at the top of the list. For example, a pineapple contains only about 2 percent fructose.
Fructose is therefore a natural substance, but an excess of fructose does not necessarily fit into a natural diet. There are growing suspicions that the fructose bombardment we expose ourselves to with our processed foods is confusing our organism. More and more scientists are linking HFCS and metabolic syndrome.
HFCS there and here
How is the situation in the Netherlands with the addition of HFCS? It is certainly a fact that the food industry in Europe has also discovered that corn syrup is a cheap solution for giving ‘defatted’ products taste. In the Netherlands, HFCS, or glucose fructose syrup, is in any case present in a number of cakes, such as ‘pink cakes’ and marrow bones. However, processing it is less common here than on the other side of the ocean, where it is hardly possible to get bread that does not contain HFCS (which is also a good preservative).
There is another difference: in the US the form HFCS 90 is mainly used, a variant with 90 percent fructose. In the Netherlands, the variants HFCS 55 and HFCS 42 are more common with 55 and 42 percent fructose respectively. HFCS does not contain more fructose than glucose in the Netherlands (and the rest of Europe). This means that it is similar to ‘regular’ sugar.
That makes HFCS in the Netherlands a somewhat less unhealthy addition than in the US. Nevertheless, it is a substance to watch out for: just like other sugars, it adds little or nothing to a healthy diet.
