The sleepy allure of high fructose corn syrup

November 11, 9:15 AMPhiladelphia Health ExaminerThomas Hartmann

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(photo: Scott's Barbecue Sauce)

Have you ever felt consistently tired after eating something sweet?  Or ever felt the need to compulsively eat more of the same food?  It may be hard to associate symptoms like these with food choices because we so often eat sweet things throughout the day, or at least with every meal.

This country is immensely fortunate to have food labeling so consumers can check what may be the cause.

Sometimes one needs to read through many ingredients in small print, but as long as consumer advocates retain some political muscle in this country one may be able to read somewhere in a long list: “high fructose corn syrup”.

Often, high fructose corn syrup is even put into “non-dessert” foods like salad dressings and packaged foods, possibly making it the “poison ivy” of foods. People have different constitutions and thus foods affect them differently – similarly, some people can touch poison ivy for years and not get a rash. But at some point after enough exposure, poison ivy begins to affect almost everyone.

If you even have an intuition that the tiredness you now combat with more coffee or cola may be due to something else, try not eating high fructose corn syrup for a few days. You may be surprised once you start noticing, but your tiredness may in fact be the dip following the spike in blood sugar that results from consuming the immensely sweet, simple sugar of the artificial product, high fructose corn syrup.  This up-and-down cycle of blood sugar prematurely may be exhausting your insulin metabolism, the body's defense against blood sugar spikes.

Similarly, your compulsion to eat more may in fact be an amplified sweet-tooth craving, so greatly amplified because high fructose corn syrup is so sweet.  Whatever America's corn lobby may say, we all know what our mothers told us:  too many sweets make us fat.  As we age, we may be hearing from our doctors, too:  being too overweight and having a poor insulin metabolism is a main cause of Type-II Diabetes.

Next week: the alternatives to high fructose corn syrup.