Last year, as always, after my columns were published, I found new information I wish I’d known about at the time, or updates worth sharing. Here’s my list for 2010:
Writing about Stevie’s Latin Village (“A restaurant to remember,” 4/8) brought back recollections for me and many readers as well – some of whose memories were better than mine! Stevie’s legendary bartender was Leonard Ganci, as both his daughter, Rosalie, and daughter-in-law, Nancy, e-mailed me, rather than Joe. (Perhaps, since my memories of Stevie’s are from my childhood, I can be forgiven that one!) Gerri Samson recognized her late mother, Dolores (Cooke) Duke in one of the pictures. (Look again, Gerri, and I’m pretty sure you’ll recognize your mom in another of the pictures.) And Mae McMillan, the waitress quoted in the article, contacted IT to say that she’s living in Jacksonville, and still active in Rt. 66 activities.
The negative reactions consisted of someone who had no intention of changing his soda habit, and two identical e-mails from Audrae Erickson, one to my personal e-mail address, one in the IT online comments.
Erickson is president of the Corn Refiners Association, an advocacy organization that includes among its members Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. It’s headquartered at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., conveniently close to the White House.
Erickson’s e-mails, like advertising campaigns her organization funds, is bent on “educating” consumers that high fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners, and has played no part in the rise of obesity: “High fructose corn syrup, sugar, and several fruit juices are all nutritionally the same. High fructose corn syrup is simply a kind of corn sugar. It has the same number of calories as sugar and is handled the same by the body.”
To support her position she quotes experts such as the American Medical Association: “high fructose syrup does not appear to contribute to obesity more than other caloric sweeteners.” And the American Dietetic Association: “high fructose corn syrup…is nutritionally equivalent to sucrose. Once absorbed into the blood stream, the two sweeteners are indistinguishable.”
Erickson continued in her e-mails, “Singling out certain foods or beverages for government penalization, whether through nutrition or tax policies, will only serve to further confuse consumers and will not lead to meaningful results in assisting Americans to adopt healthier lifestyles.”
And finally: “Manufacturers of corn sweeteners do not receive government subsidies. Our industry buys corn on the open market at the prevailing market price.”
All true – at least I thought so at the time. Even so, Erickson was missing or obscuring the point. (Incidentally, industrial food producers frequently claim that consumers will be “confused” by labels or information about how their wares are produced or what they contain, which I find demeaning and insulting.) Yes, corn farmers are the ones who receive government subsidies, not corn refiners. Those subsidies ensure that farmers produce more and more corn, even when their costs of production are higher than the price they receive for it on the “open market.” That “open market” is dominated by a very few corporations – among them ADM and Cargill – that are so encompassing that they exercise considerable control over that “prevailing market price.”
I’d heard some anecdotal stories about the negative health implications of high fructose corn syrup, but nothing that qualified as hard facts when I wrote the article. But in August, a team from the University of Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center changed that. The Reuters Agency headlined: “Cancer Cells Slurp Up Fructose, US Study Finds.”
Head researcher Anthony Heaney and fellow researchers found that pancreatic cancer cells (one of cancer’s deadliest forms) use fructose to divide and proliferate, challenging commonly held wisdom that all sugars are equal. The team found that pancreatic tumor cells used glucose and fructose in different ways. “Tumor cells thrive on sugar but they used the fructose to proliferate. Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different,” Heaney’s team wrote in the journal Cancer Research. “[These findings] may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, [and] have major significance for cancer patients, given dietary refined fructose consumption, …. indicat[ing] that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth.”
“I think this paper has a lot of public health implications. Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diets,” Heaney stated.
In 2004 researchers reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that U.S. consumption of high fructose corn syrup went up 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990.
It will be interesting to see what, if any, Erickson’s response will be.
A trip to Mississipi and Southwestern Louisana in October provided a firsthand update on the oil spill. [See “Gulf tragedy gets personal,” 7/15.] I heard a panel discussion on the effects of the oil spill on the fishing and culinary scene. Although no one precisely can predict the long-term effects, the panelists were cautiously optimistic for a revival of much of the fishing industry. The biggest problems seemed to be that the fishermen/shrimpers were being paid so much by BP for cleanup work, they’d be unwilling to go back to the hard labor of fishing, and public suspicion about the safety of Gulf seafood. Everyone agreed that the most endangered shellfish were oysters because of dispersants used to break up the oil, causing much of it to fall to the ocean floor instead of floating on top. Since oysters live on the ocean floor and that bottom oil is virtually impossible to remove, long-term contamination is likely. Indeed, oysters were the only seafood lacking at restaurants, though we were lucky to visit Duprey’s in Abbeville on the very first day oysters became available.
IT staff writer Patrick Yeagle participated in “An exercise in empathy” (9/16), eating on a budget of just $4.15 per day, simulating the amount that food stamp users receive. He says:
“The hunger challenge was both easy and hard: easy in that the actual cost restraints were absolutely feasible, and hard in that it took a lot of work to calculate and record what each morsel cost. I suspect it would have been much harder to do for a month because it was so easy to forget the challenge and go over budget if I wasn’t totally vigilant. While it wasn’t overly difficult for a week, I can realistically see myself falling behind on my budget after a couple of slip-ups over a longer time. In general, I followed the advice you and my sister gave me: eat in season, practice portion control, buy in bulk and cook your own food. As an added bonus, that approach also favors a healthy diet, encouraging the use of fresh fruits and vegetables, natural grains and a variety of different foods to round out nutritional needs.”
Enos Park Neighborhood Improvement Association board member and IT editor Fletcher Farrar reported on the EPNIA pie and cookie sales (“Baking pies to build a better neighborhood,” 11/4): “We raised about $3,000. At our December meeting we watched a slide show of all the year’s activities – it was exhausting just to watch all we’d done!” Exhausted they may be, but the EPNIA is also exhilarated about its future – their master plan awaiting city council approval, continuing to tear down slum houses, and restoring historic homes. Even for those of us who don’t live there, it’ll be fun to watch what happens.
Contact Julianne Glatz at realcuisine.jg@gmail.com.
Ms. Erickson is a spokesperson for an industry with a major financial interest in the question at hand, and it is proper to approach her statements with caution. Nevertheless, I believe you did not give her entirely fair consideration. As someone with no connections to or interest in the industry, I’m hoping I’ll have a better chance of correcting some key misunderstandings in your article. It’s clear you have the best of intentions, and your article’s core concerns are largely valid, but the implications are misleading.
First, I should address the new research that’s raised your level of concern. It’s true that there is some evidence associating fructose with certain health risks. But this evidence is unclear, and is difficult to separate from general sugar consumption, dietary habits and obesity. At this time the evidence is not strong enough to support claims that consumption of fructose, as opposed to other sugars, clearly has specific health effects. The Heaney paper you cite made a discovery that could indeed be very important, but it suffers from similar problems.
Cancer cells are known to consume high quantities of glucose; sugar is fuel, after all, and cancer cells generally produce energy less efficiently than normal cells, so they tend to consume more glucose. In fact, medical research is looking into the possibility of exploiting that phenomenon, something which led to the recent DCA brouhaha...but I will skip that digression.
What was less known was how cancer cells used fructose, and how that compared to their use of glucose. Heaney’s research has shed some light on that, and has discovered that cancer cells in culture tend to use fructose to help synthesize DNA, which is important for cell division.
And that’s it. That’s all Heaney showed. They did not show that fructose caused cancer to appear. They did not show that it caused cancer cells to grow more rapidly. They did not show that it caused cancer to progress more rapidly in experimental animals (their research was entirely in cell cultures). They cited some papers that suggested fructose might be associated with higher pancreatic cancer risks, but they were prospective studies with weak results and a good risk for confounders. They most certainly did not justify dietary or public policy recommendations like “Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of HFCS in our diets.” The research could be the beginning of something very big, but that statement was unsupported and irresponsible on several levels. I’ll elaborate on that in a bit, but first I need to review the broader context of HFCS in the food industry.
It is by no means “commonly held wisdom that all sugars are equal”, at least not in the scientific community. Any biochemistry student can tell you that different sugars are metabolized differently, and can serve different functions in the body. The metabolic pathways of fructose are well known. I suspect the point that you are misunderstanding here is that nearly all sugary sweeteners contain roughly similar amounts of fructose.
When the American Dietetic Association says “high fructose corn syrup…is nutritionally equivalent to sucrose” they are not talking about calories. They are talking about the chemical makeup of the sweeteners themselves. Ordinary table sugar is sucrose, which is a disaccharide—two simple sugar molecules bound together. Those two molecules are glucose and fructose, which themselves account for the bulk of monosaccharides Americans consume. Once consumed (and in some cases even before consumption) the disaccharide is split into those two constituent monosaccharides--your body doesn’t absorb or metabolize sucrose, only glucose and fructose. This means that sucrose, whether it’s derived from cane or beets, is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. Compare this to the most commonly used form of HFCS, which is 55% fructose to 45% glucose. The same holds true for other common sweeteners; honey, fruit juices, maple syrup, agave syrup, etc. So whether you consume sucrose or a glucose/fructose mix, you absorb and metabolize roughly the same amounts of fructose.
Since the introduction of HFCS, the ratio of fructose to glucose in Americans’ diets has remained the same, because HFCS is so similar to other sweeteners. In fact, in many cases the introduction of HFCS has likely reduced the absolute amount of sweetener, and therefore fructose, in a given food item. As I mentioned, table sugar is sucrose, and it remains in that disaccharide form until shortly after consumption. HFCS consists of already disassociated glucose and fructose. Fructose tastes sweeter than glucose or the disaccharide sucrose. The upshot of all this is that if you compare the same amount of sucrose to a 50/50 mix of glucose/fructose, the mix will taste sweeter...and you can use less of it. Food manufacturers are able to make lower-calorie foods by using sweeteners like HFCS. Before HFCS existed, a form of sucrose that had been partially disassociated into glucose and fructose was often used. Despite being more expensive to produce than regular sugar, it could save costs because less had to be used to achieve the same sweetness.
What does any of this mean in the context of diet and public health? Hard to say. As discussed above, there are hints that fructose might be at play in certain diseases, but there’s not nearly enough information to blame it for anything yet. Science doesn’t treat preliminary studies, confounding factors and weak significance as definitive for very good reason. See recent articles about the Decline Effect to understand what happens when we do.
But there are some things we do know to a fair degree of confidence. For starters, the research of Heaney, and some others, suggest we need to look much more closely at the roles of both fructose and glucose in cancer, and possibly in other diseases as well. Even if the cancer research doesn’t establish any benefit from manipulating glucose or fructose, it may improve our understanding of cancer in general.
Beyond that, we know that there is a major health crisis resulting from obesity. Research has pretty clearly established that, social and psychological trends aside, the reason Americans are increasingly obese is that we’re consuming more calories and burning fewer. As you cite, American consumption of HFCS may have risen tenfold over twenty years. While it’s almost certain that much of that increase was offset by a decrease in other sweeteners--table sugar, maple syrup, honey, etc.--I’d bet good money that the increase is partly due to increased overall calorie intake. According to the USDA, between 1970 and 2003, American consumption of sweeteners rose 19 percent, about 76 calories per day. A little surprisingly, our consumption of fats and oils, grains and vegetables all increased more.
The health consequences of obesity are likely to dwarf most (but not all!) of the consequences of any given change in the relative proportions of foods we eat. But the early research hints about fructose clearly show we need to investigate it more. It’s possible that some things associated with obesity are, in fact, a consequence of the increased fructose consumption that would statistically accompany obesity. Even if fructose proves to be as harmless as any sugar or protein can be, controlling calorie consumption is critical to reducing obesity, and sugars are such an obvious area to cut.
But that does not make it appropriate to condemn HFCS specifically. The problems we face here are obesity and, just maybe, fructose. And fructose consumption is no more the fault of HFCS than most any other natural sweetener, except in the sense that HFCS makes sugary sweeteners cheaper and thus more readily available. If cane sugar was cheaper than HFCS, we could “blame” it. But even then, until we know more about any possible dangers of fructose, it’s irresponsible to make public policy or dietary recommendations targeting fructose. At this point, all we can responsibly say is that we should be eating less and exercising more, and that cutting back on sugary foods is one of the easiest steps we can take. I think a “sin tax” on certain items is a reasonable means of encouraging that goal.