Corn sweeteners likely culprit

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Oct, 2004

By coupling extensive Department of Agriculture food consumption data and their own analyses with previous research, nutritionists have concluded that high-fructose sweeteners made from corn are partially responsible for the growing national obesity epidemic. Introduction of the sweeteners, which are cheaper to produce and use in food manufacturing than cane and beet sugars, correspond closely time-wise with the epidemic's start, the researchers claim. Several other biological factors associated with high-fructose corn sweeteners appear to boost their negative effects on Americans' waistlines as well.

"Body weights rose slowly for most of the 20th century until the late 1980s," says George A. Bray, Boyd professor at the Louisiana State University System's Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge. "At that time, many countries showed a sudden increase in the rate at which obesity has been galloping forward."

The usual suspects for burgeoning fatness in this country have been the increase in food intake and a drop in physical activity. To examine the potential role of excess eating, Bray analyzed USDA consumption records from 1967-2000. "In examining this data, the importance of the rising intake of high fructose corn syrup was obvious. It did not exist before 1970. From that point, there was a rapid rise in this country in its use during the late 1970s and 1980s coincidental with the epidemic of obesity." In fact, consumption of high fructose corn sweeteners increased more than 1,000% between 1970 and 1990, far exceeding changes in intake of any other food or food group.

The extra sweetness of solutions such as soft drinks and fruit beverages containing glucose and fructose appears to boost caloric intake sharply. "We know that high-fructose corn syrups now provide the entire source of calories in these beverages," Bray states. "Although this data does not prove a causal link, the timing of their introduction end the known differences in sweetness between fructose and sucrose make corn syrups very strong suspects in the increased beverage intake that has occurred over the past 25 years."

Using what he calls very conservative estimates, the researcher showed that more than 132 calories per day for all Americans age two and older come from the corn sweeteners. Moreover, among those who consume a lot of soft drinks--the top 20% of consumers--over 316 calories per day come from high fructose corn sweeteners.