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You'll Never Eat Corn Syrup Again After Knowing How It's Made

Corn syrup is one of those ingredients we are told not to eat because it's unhealthy. But do we still eat foods with it? Probably every single time.

Corn syrup is produced from corn starch and is the base for high-fructose corn syrup, which is thought to cause obesity and other major health problems. Although corn syrup is widely recognized as being unhealthy for you, many people don’t know how the controversial sweetener is made.

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Featured

 Corn Syrups: Clearing up the Confusion

Corn syrups comprise two distinct product families: “regular” corn syrups, and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Much confusion has arisen about corn syrups in the past five years, largely because of the ill-considered controversy surrounding HFCS. The confusion ranges from uncertainty about the basic composition of the products to debates over sophisticated metabolism and nutrition issues.

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Articles of Interest

Corn Syrup: What's That Sweet Taste?

Corn syrup was invented in 1882. It is made by enzymatic conversion of cornstarch to a syrup mostly containing glucose (also known as blood sugar or dextrose). It is available for home use (as Karo syrup and maple-flavored pancake syrup for example) and is used commercially to sweeten many manufactured foods, from salad dressing, drink mixes, and fruit drinks to puddings, ice milk, and tomato sauces. The glucose content of corn syrup can range from 20 percent to 98 percent, but when you see “corn syrup” listed on a product label, you have no way of knowing how much glucose it contains.

Is Corn Syrup Bad for You?

You can buy corn syrup in any grocery store in the baking aisle. High fructose corn syrup, on the other hand, is an ingredient that you might see on the label of processed food - and you cannot buy it in the supermarket.

Should I Eat Corn?

But when corn isn’t in the form of a kernel, it’s often bastardized beyond recognition. Words like dextrose, maltodextrin, maltose, malititol, xylitol, polydextrose and hydrolyzed vegetable protein can all be derived from corn, not to mention the more obvious things like high fructose corn syrup and corn oil...

The Evils of Corn Syrup: How Food Writers Got It Wrong

All of this makes me wonder: Could it be that Big Corn is being pressured to rebrand not due to an abundance of hard evidence that HFCS is an unusually dangerous sweetener, but rather because of the skewed assessments of food writers who have set out to deem HFCS the sole harbinger of civilization's decline into epidemical obesity?

The Real Difference Between Corn Syrup And High-Fructose Corn Syrup

Health risks have been so strongly associated with high-fructose corn syrup that passing a bottle of "corn syrup" in the grocery store might cause you to think, "Why are they selling that stuff?"

What is corn syrup, and how should you use it? Your questions, answered.

Is it the same as high-fructose corn syrup? No. High-fructose corn syrup is corn syrup that has been further treated with enzymes to break down some of the glucose into another common sugar, fructose.

What Is Corn Syrup, Exactly?

In its purest form, corn syrup is a type of sugar that comes from—you guessed it—corn. Unlike granulated sugar, which comes from sugar cane and sugar beets, corn syrup is a liquid. Both sweeteners are naturally occurring, but they have different chemical properties. Corn syrup is pure glucose, a simple sugar molecule, while table sugar is sucrose, a combo of glucose and fructose molecules.

Resources

Corn Refiners Association

Corn refiners produce a variety of sweeteners in order to meet the demand of both consumers and food manufacturers. All corn sweeteners are natural and share important advantages–stability and crystallization control, for example. But, each type of sweetener provides different qualities to food makers, offering contrasting levels of sweetness, a range of caloric values, and other important properties. For example, corn sweeteners are able to: