I see that the Corn Refiners Association is petitioning the FDA to change the name of their ingredient – as it appears on food labels — from corn “syrup” to corn “sugar.” There’s an amusing footnote to this story. A hundred years ago, Karo Corn Syrup – a product still on the market – was fighting to be listed as “syrup,” not glucose (a simple sugar), on its label.
To appreciate this story, I first need to explain a few things.
• Fructose is the sugar in fruits. Glucose is the sugar in corn, sugar beets, sugar cane, rice, and many other sources of starch. Dextrose is simply another name for naturally occurring glucose . (There’s another type of glucose that can be synthesized.)
• Corn syrup is what you get when you process corn with water. 100 years ago, the process involved hydrochloric acid, heat, and pressure. Today manufacturers use enzymes to break down the corn starch so it’s soluble. Corn syrup is glucose.
• High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is not the same as corn syrup. It’s produced by adding yet another enzyme to corn syrup, which changes most of the glucose to fructose. Manufacturers produce HFCS with different ratios of fructose to glucose. For example, 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose, which is about the same as the ratio in honey
• The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906. The skirmish in 1910 over Karo Corn Syrup’s label was an early example of the federal government’s regulation of food labels.
What exactly is a syrup?
The kerfuffle over corn syrup involved the term “syrup.” When Karo was permitted to change its label from glucose to syrup, the American Medical Association (AMA) objected. It argued that what the public understood by “syrup” was the sap of a sugar-producing plant that had been boiled down to produce syrup. Maple syrup from trees, for example, used to be boiled in nearby “sugar shacks.”
A 1910 editorial in The Journal of the American Medical Association reeks with outrage and sarcasm.
Permission to do this [change the label] was granted, though the reason for such a liberal interpretation of the law in favor of the manufactuer and so evidently against the interest of the consumer, is not known. … The state of Wisconsin … requires that the label shall contain the naked truth rather than the skillfully adorned euphemism.
Since the common meanings of both “glucose” and “syrup” have changed, it’s a bit difficult to appreciate this controversy today. For example, the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned the sale of Karo Corn Syrup with ingredients listed as “corn syrup” (according to the AMA, it was 90 percent glucose and 10% “real” syrup):
Nor can it be said that the great mass of persons understand that “corn syrup” is a mixture of glucose and syrup. The natural result of such use of the term “corn syrup” is to mislead the consumers into the belief that they are obtaining a table-food of the variety and kind commonly known as syrup, the product of sugar-producing plants, and the consequences of such practice are that the consumers are misled and deceived in the respects as to the actual nature, the constituents and the value of the article as a food product.
But since corn syrup is glucose, that first sentence would no longer hold up in court. And these days, calling something “real” is about as meaningful as saying a food product is “all natural.”
What’s clear from the objections of both the AMA and the state of Wisconsin, however, is that food producers and the government have been arguing over truth-in-labeling for a very long time.
Pecan pie, anyone?
What does Karo Corn Syrup list as its ingredients today? From their website:
Corn syrup is a mildly sweet, concentrated solution of dextrose [glucose] and other sugars [fructose, maybe?] derived from corn starch. It is naturally sweet. Corn syrup contains between 15% to 20% dextrose (glucose) and a mixture of various other types of sugar.
That’s about as revealing as pleading the fifth amendment.
What it all boils down to is this: If it flows like a syrup and says it’s made from corn, you can use it to make a traditional Southern pecan pie in 2010.
Update 9/20/10:
‘High-Fructose’ Just Sounds Bad (The Atlantic)
Excellent comments on the HFCS name change by Corby Kummer, who’s been writing about the subject for years.
I’m glad that HFCS has been successfully vilified, and even if consumers are avoiding it out of ignorance … their avoidance could mean they eat less “liquid candy,” as Marion [Nestle] was one of the first to call soda.
Don’t Sugar-Coat High-Fructose Corn Syrup (The Atlantic)
Another great article on the subject from The Atlantic by Anna Lappe, daughter of Frances Moore Lappe, who wrote Diet for a Small Planet
In 2008, the Corn Refiners Association spent at least $13 million and as much as $20 million in a massive public relations campaign about the natural goodness of high fructose corn syrup, including television ads aimed mainly at moms. That’s nine times more than what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allocated that year for its entire 5-a-Day fruits and vegetables program. Is it any wonder then that the total daily fruit consumption of a typical American is equivalent to one third of a medium-sized banana? Or that 48 percent of vegetable servings that Americans ate in 2000 came from just three foods: tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and potatoes, which were mainly in the form of French fries and potato chips.
Related posts:
This is your brain on sugar — and sugar substitutes
What’s wrong with our food?
Sin taxes: Financing health care with soda pop
Calories: What are we really counting?
The So-Called Obesity “Epidemic”
Obesity: Moving beyond willpower vs. the food-industrial complex
Resources:
Image source: Eddy van Damme
Tara Parker-Pope, A New Name for High-Fructose Corn Syrup, The New York Times, September 14, 2010
Where Glucose Is not Corn Syrup, The Journal of the American Medical Association, July 2, 1910 (reprinted July 7, 2010, Vol. 304 No. 1)
Daniel Engber, Dark Sugar: The decline and fall of high-fructose corn syrup, Slate, April 28, 2009
Laurie Burkitt, Food Fight: The Battle over Sweeteners, Forbes, March 20, 2009
George A Bray, Samara Joy Nielsen and Barry M Popkin, Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 79, No. 4, pp 537-543, April 2004
George A Bray, How bad is fructose?, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 86, No. 4, pp 895-896, October 2007
Michael Pollan, What’s Eating America, Smithsonian, June 15, 2006
How corn is turned into corn syrup, Corn Refiners Association
I did not know the history of these kinds of discussions and disagreements regarding food labels. Very interesting.
But they won’t stop me from eating Southern Pecan Pie.
I am not a scientist but from my lay-person’s perspective, it is still less what we eat than how much we eat, no matter how it is labelled. Plus I don’t think the average person pays much attention to the labels on food. In today’s world convenience trumps all.
Hi Roberta – Thanks for your thoughts. You’re right. It doesn’t take a scientist to know that eating too much isn’t good for you. There are a lot more calorie-dense foods today, though. So you might eat the same number of cubic inches of food as in the past, but get way more calories.
I’ve said this somewhere else recently – it always amuses me that scientists are very careful not to offend the sugar industry. They refer to foods whose calories are entirely from sugar as high energy foods, which puts such a positive spin on things.
Unfortunately, you have to be careful about what you say. Oprah Winfrey got sued big time by the Texas Cattlemen when she said she wasn’t going to eat beef anymore during a discussion of mad cow disease. It cost her millions of dollars in legal fees. Fortunately she could afford it, but it has a chilling effect.
Yes, Jan, all that is very true. I was basically talking about standard home-cooked foods from real ingredients not so much from laboratory foods. (See my post on what is really in a Twinkie. There is an entire book on it too, as I am sure you are aware.)
As we have discussed before, foods today are made for stimulation. Excitement. I am talking the hyper-palatable foods that David Kessler writes about in his excellent, The End of Overeating. That is foods that are made up of sugar-on sugar- on fat-on fat-on fat-on salt-and on fat, and on and on. That is a new phenomenon of maybe the last ten+ years or so.
And this kind of food according to Dr. Kessler is re-wiring the brain much as TV can re-wire the brain of a baby if he/she is just set in front of it for hours.
Everyone on every topic puts “spin” on things today. Can barely believe what you read, hear, or see these days.
This is an endlessly interesting topic.
As for being sued, I remember that Oprah case. Made the career of Dr. Phil. Main reason they went after her was her big audience and high profile. Fortunately, (fingers-crossed) I am just a little ‘ole peon.
P.S. How can I edit the mis-spellings in my first post on this topic. Actually, I am not a bad speller. I am a poor typist. And if you believe either of those statements I have a high-energy Twinkie for you.
Roberta – Yes, I was thinking of snacks and you were — quite rightly — thinking of the food real people cook. I believe the foods that we eat more of today are not the home-cooked ones. And those ingredients probably haven’t changed that much over time (I need to look into the details). It’s snacks and restaurant food that are the culprits. Of course, eating too much delicious home-cooking isn’t good for the waistline either.
I wasn’t aware of a book on Twinkie ingredients, but I looked it up, and I assume you mean Twinkie, Deconstructed. Cute title. I also found The Twinkies Cookbook, which includes recipes for Twinkie Sushi, Twinkie Burrito, Pigs in a Twinkie, Pumpkin Twinkie Bread Pudding, and Peanut Butter and Jelly Twinkie Cake.
Here’s a link to your Twinkie post: Twinkie Twinkie Little Food
Endlessly interesting, yes. Food for many blog posts.
P.S. I added a plug-in to allow editing comments, but I haven’t had the courage yet to go into the php code and see if I can make it work. I corrected a few typos. Contrary to the editing software’s prompting, I left “labelled” unchanged. (I can’t even type it that way in Microsoft Word, which thinks it knows what I want much better than I do.) It’s not incorrect, and it’s too much to expect writers to remember what’s proper in British, Canadian, and American spelling. Which reminds me of a book and website I enjoy – Grammar Girl. I like her attitude.
I wonder if Grammar Girl would like my English Rules. I visited the site but was not there long enough to decide one way or the other.
ENGLISH RULES
Avoid alliteration. Always.
Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
Avoid cliches like the plague!
It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
Contractions aren’t necessary.
Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
Who needs rhetorical questions?
I’m sure Grammar Girl would appreciate your sense of humor, as do I. :-)
She has a long article explaining how the split infinitive myth originated. “If you split infinitives, you’ll likely get nasty mail from cranky people who believe it’s their job to enforce imaginary grammar rules; so [doing] it kind of depends on how much you hate getting that kind of mail.”