After reading about how the food industry engineers our food in David Kessler’s The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, this news isn’t surprising at all.
Dr. Kessler, of course, was the head of the F.D.A. under the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton.
At issue here, is high-fructose corn syrup — which is in damn near every processed food in America. It’s also one of the cheapest ways to infuse food with sugar, an ingredient that makes food addictive.
If the specter of obesity and diabetes wasn’t enough to turn you off high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), try this: New research suggests that the sweetener could be tainted with mercury, putting millions of children at risk for developmental problems.In 2004, Renee Dufault, an environmental health researcher at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stumbled upon an obscure Environmental Protection Agency report on chemical plants’ mercury emissions. Some chemical companies, she learned, make lye by pumping salt through large vats of mercury. Since lye is a key ingredient in making HFCS (it’s used to separate corn starch from the kernel), Dufault wondered if mercury might be getting into the ubiquitous sweetener that makes up 1 out of every 10 calories Americans eat.
Notice the use of the word “lye” above. Also note that lye, aka potassium hydroxide, is also an ingredient in bleach, soap, dye and alkaline batteries among other things.
Dufault sent HFCS samples from three manufacturers that used lye to labs at the University of California-Davis and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The labs found mercury in most of the samples. In September 2005, Dufault presented her findings to the FDA’s center for food safety. She was surprised by what happened next. “I was instructed not to do any more investigation,” she recalls. FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Kwisnek says that the agency decided against further investigation because it wasn’t convinced “that there was any evidence of a risk.”
Here’s Kessler talking about the power of food, our obsession with it and how the food industry manipulates us:
This article appears in Best of Charlotte 2009.
As a registered dietitian and consultant to the food and beverage industry, I disagree with some statements made about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and question the credibility of the study referenced.
First of all, there is no scientific evidence that HFCS causes obesity, diabetes or is addictive. Past studies that tried to implicate HFCS were done with pure fructose, which has no relevance to our daily diets or to HFCS. HFCS is made from corn and is deemed “natural” by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). HFCS is approximately equal amounts of fructose and glucose. Regular table sugar is 50% fructose and 50% glucose, whereas HFCS is either 42% or 55% fructose with the remainder as glucose. Your body can’t tell the difference between honey, sugar and HFCS; they’re metabolized the same and they all contain exactly the same (4 calories per gram) calories.
Regarding the mercury study, many scientists consider the results of this research to be suspect because the sample size involved was extremely small. In fact, the testing was done on only a single sample of each brand. While mercury was initially found at a detectable limit in some beverages, the levels reported are not a health concern. In fact, the reported levels are approximately 40 times less than the level of mercury permitted in common drinking water by US EPA. Another concern with this study relates to the “type” of mercury measured, as health concern issues depend on what form of mercury is present.
An independent review by Dr. Woodhall Stopford of Duke University Medical Center, one of the nation’s leading experts in mercury contamination, found that:
o No quantifiable mercury was detected in any of the samples analyzed.
o High fructose corn syrup does not appear to be a measureable contributor to mercury in foods
o The introduction of HFCS as a sweetener has not been associated with any noticeable difference in mercury levels in foods and beverages containing high fructose corn syrup.
Resources for additional information on HFCS include: http://www.SweetSurprise.com and http://www.BeverageInstitute.org and http://www.ific.org