MMWS: Day 5 – Chemistry Class

I’ve spent about five days now explaining to people the theory behind a) my book, and b) my ridiculous experiment.

Common objections:

• “But honey’s ALL NATURAL!”
• “You really ought to cut out ALL simple carbohydrates.”
• “So, you’ll drink alcohol, but you won’t eat sugar.  Alcohol is made from sugar.  God, I hate you.”
• “Get off my lawn!”

And so forth.  But by far, the most common thing people say, in one form or another, is: “It’s that damn high-fructose corn syrup.”  There is a very common perception out there, among otherwise rational people, that someone has snuck up on us with a big bucket of corn syrup, which has mind-control powers, and we’ve all been duped into eating something with the health benefits of pureed cigarette butt stuffed asbestos cakes with a honey-mercury glacé.

Today’s lesson… CHEMISTRY!

Have you ever wondered what the difference between a fructose (it’s from FRUIT!  Yay!), sucrose (boo!), and glucose (uh… comes in bags on rolling stands?) is?  How about that high-fructose corn syrup?  How bad could it be?  Sounds like health food to me.  Corn… from a plaid shirted farmer in Iowa… mixed with fructose… which they get from… uh… apples.  High-fructose means more apple juice than corn because that’s more flavorful.

That’s almost right– except that instead of apples, the fructose comes from glucose treated by genetically-modified enzymes after being broken down from starches by some goo exuded by the aspergillus fungus.  Throw in some mercury (yes, for real) and various other patented and frightening industrial processes, and you get high-fructose corn syrup!  It’s “natural” (according to the ad campaign developed by the corn syrup refiners) and “fine in moderation.”  That’s a glowing recommendation if ever I heard one.  Slightly ambiguous on the “fine” and “moderation” definitions, but… you get the idea.  Now, eat.

OK, let’s back up.  Sugar 101.  Note: I am not a chemist.  My dad has a degree in chemistry, but that was then they grouped chemicals by “stinkiness” and “how burny it is when you stick your finger in it.”  So, don’t expect text book science here.  I just thought it was worth a quick review just to shed a little light on all this sweetener nonsense I’m going on about.  If you find something here is inaccurate, keep it to yourself.  You’ll make me look stupid.

“sugar: carbohydrate: an essential structural component of living cells and source of energy for animals; includes simple sugars with small molecules as well as macromolecular substances; are classified according to the number of monosaccharide groups they contain”
– Princeton’s Online Dictionary

Simple Sugars (or Monosaccharides):

For our overly-loose and unscientific purposes, this includes fructose and glucose.  They’ve got the same chemical formula: C6H12O6.  Fructose is an isomer of glucose.   That is to say that they’re just built differently.  Same parts, different design.

Glucose is the basic sugar that your body uses to convert into other forms of energy. In fact, it’s the basic sugar of life.  It’s what plants produce with photosynthesis and serves as a building block to everything from vitamin C to protein.  Glucose gets used by the body in a hurry.  If you eat it, absent fibers and fats to slow it down, it goes into the liver and muscles as glycogen, feeds the brain, and stuffs the adipose tissue (i.e., makes you fat).

I don’t mean to give glucose a bad rap.  You need it to live.  If you don’t eat enough carbo fuel your body will start converting whatever it can get its hands on to glucose, starting with protein.  Ultimately, you start to lose muscle mass, your metabolism drops, and you feel terrible.  No, you want to keep getting enough carbohydrates to get a decent supply of glucose.  As we’ll see, the trick to it is making your body work a bit to get at it.

For future reference, make note of the fact that the way plants, say your corn-type plants, store this glucose is in the form of starches (chains of glucose).  Like corn starch, for instance.  That’s called foreshadowing.

Likewise, fructose is a simple sugar.  However, because of the difference in structure, it’s a different molecule, chemically, than glucose.  Your body does not readily utilize fructose.  In fact, forms of it tend to pass right through to your urine and lower intestine.  Sounds good, right?  Eat all the sugar you want and just pee it out!  The problem is that your lower intestine is not happy about this concentrated “hygroscopic” stuff.  In infants, excessive amounts, often in the form of healthy apple and pear juices, lead to something nice called “osmotic diarrhea,” which basically means excessive amounts of liquid forms in the lower intestines, mixing with the solid waste, and… you get the idea.

As swell as that sounds, there are some other little complications that fructose causes down there– assuming you get past the osmotic diarrhea stage of life.  The natural beasties of the colon will actually ferment the fructose– colon champagne.  While it doesn’t provide a buzz of champagne, it does provide the bubbles.  Bubbles.  In the colon.  Use your imagination.

So, as I said, the body doesn’t use fructose.  Instead, the liver converts it to glucose and fat (among about a dozen other things with names I can’t pronounce). By some accounts, the low “glycemic index” of fructose (a measure of the impact on blood sugar of different foods) is not so much a measure of the low levels of blood sugar as the shortness of duration.  That is, they spike high but for a short time.  Glycemic index is essentially multiplication of those two dimensions.  So, fructose disrupts the system more, but leaves the eater feeling hungry faster.

Fructose, chemically speaking, is a little harder to defend than glucose.  It doesn’t do anything very good.  However, I fall solidly into the holistic camp on the matter.  You are better off eating fruit than white bread.  The whole package contains so much more nutrition that the included fructose has to be considered part of the deal.  Fruit provides fiber, which luckily is just the thing to slow the absorption of sugar, vitamins, and all sorts of micronutrients.  Simple carbs, like processed foods contain, are just that– simple.  You might find simple starches have less fructose than a pear, but I’ll take the pear.

On the plus side, fructose tastes sweeter than glucose.  It also tends to last longer (you see where this is going?).  Fructose is more… industrially friendly than glucose.  Also, when combined with other sugars, it has the interesting affect of making the whole mix taste sweeter than its individual components.

Sugar and High-Fructose Corn Syrup

As you can see, the name “sugar” is a little ambiguous.  I’m talking about table sugar from cane and beets.  That stuff is mostly sucrose, a disaccharide of, guess what, glucose and fructose.  That means that each molecule of sucrose is a chemically bonded pair of glucose and fructose molecules.  Oddly enough, that’s the best part.  It seems that the necessity of the body’s enzymes to break up this bond, which it readily does usually, contributes to some degree of “self-control” of the absorption of the glucose part of the equation.  The body has some ability to control that reaction by regulating the enzyme that does the splitting.  As with fiber and fats, if you keep the body occupied tearing down the food to digest it, it slows the absorption of the glucose and, so, controls the release of insulin (the stuff that shuttles glucose to its assigned destinations and helps utilize it, more on that later).  If you juice a sugar beet or sugar cane and cook down the results, you get, more or less, pure sucrose.

So, what’s the deal with high-fructose corn syrup?  Remember my tricky foreshadowing about starches in corn?  It turns out that if you take those starches and break them up, you get a lovely syrup of nearly pure glucose.  Glucose, though, doesn’t keep too well, and it’s not nearly as good for making processed food as fructose.  Luckily, the Japanese came up with an industrial process to convert glucose to fructose back in the 60s.  It involves several stages of conversion that include nifty components like an aspergillus fungus product and, apparently in some cases, mercury. That probably contributes to it being a weirdly secret industrial process.  When Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis made the film King Corn and tried to follow their corn through that stage of the process, they were refused entry to the plants.  Hmm…

What you get at the end, though, is a very stable blend of, most commonly, roughly equal parts glucose and fructose.  The syrup is easy to transport and process, keeps for a really long time, and dissolves readily into everything from soda to yogurt.  If we skip the reports of nasty trace contaminants, like the aforementioned mercury, and stick with the physiological effects, you may see the problem with this stuff already.  There’s nothing to break down.  HFCS is straight up glucose, which goes right into the blood, and fructose, processed with some difficulty by the liver into fat and more glucose (and, in the extreme cases, farts and diarrhea).

So, HFCS is bad, right?  Yeah, I think it is.

So, HFCS is responsible for me being so fat, right?  Whoa.  Hang on, there, chubby.

All of the above said, there are a couple of over-arching items that, in my reading of this material, swamp out the vast majority of any differences between all of these forms of sugar.  First is the forms in which they’re eaten.  If you chow a box of All-Natural Fruit SugarBomb Breakfast Bars, you’re getting a huge serving of sugar mixed into pre-masticated carbs, with a preservative topping.  I’m sort of surprised that stuff doesn’t make people just pass out from the blood sugar jolt.  If you then pick yourself up a Double Caramel Latte (with skim, please), you’re doing it again.  And we do it again and again and again.  We live in a time and place where it is actually harder not to do those things. You have to exert yourself to resist the play between your actual hunger, your boredom, peer pressure, your genetic predisposition to eat sweet stuff, and the pervasive availability and marketing of every variation of processed “food products”.

I don’t care if they make those things with HFCS, freshly harvested honey, “evaporated cane juice” (my favorite euphemism for sugar), or boiled down pear paste.  It’s all concentrated over-available sugar.  Is sucrose better than HFCS?  Not if if comes in a 64 oz. Double Gulp.  The long and short of it is that we eat great gobs of sugar– most of it fructose to add flatulence to injury.  It just so happens that the worst offenders are processed foods, and processed foods use HFCS because of a strange confluence of economics, politics, and chemistry.  It’s not going to help an awful lot to replace that particular form of sugar with sucrose if it continues to come in pseudo-food packages of gout-inducing proportions.

The other 500-lb. gorilla in the room is exercise.  Just about everything involved in the processing of sugars by the body is improved with exercise, and Americans do that less and less.  When we lived in Japan a few years ago, our house was at the top of a very large hill, and we didn’t own a car.  Just executing our normal life involved so much walking up and down that hill that I literally couldn’t eat enough.  I lost about 30 lbs. when I lived there for a year, and I ate great, heaping helpings of stuff that’d make your average dietitian fly into a rage.  I’m not advocating a diet of Crunky chocolate bars, Coolish ice cream packets, sake, and fried chicken stuffed with cheese (Mmm…), but it was pretty clear that if you stoke the fires high enough, the fuel seems to matter less and less– just keep it coming.  For what it’s worth, I now drive a car and have replaced about 15 of those pounds.  Haven’t had a Crunky in years.

So, the best we can hope for in a normal American life, I’d guess, is a happy medium.  Try to make sure that most of your food didn’t come from a factory.  Take note of the labels and anything that does have them– in particular, look out for added sweeteners, be they sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.  All else being equal, take the sugar, but don’t let that lull you into feeling that you’ve really done anything good for yourself as much as something slightly less bad.  The basic chemistry, if anything, teaches us that we need to tie up our sugar intake into as complex and unprocessed food wrappers as we can manage.  Make your body work for that glucose. Come on, small intestines, give me 20!

Next time, I’ll talk about insulin.  It’s not just something I shoot into my cat twice a day.  Science is starting to find that it is potentially the key to unlocking the root causes of our various epidemics of diabetes, certainly, but also heart disease, cancer, and obesity.  I’ll give you the non-biologist’s rundown on what that stuff is and how we might influence our bodies to keep it (and the corresponding intertwined cast of characters) at healthy levels.

I’ll try to keep it a little shorter.  I do go on, don’t I?