We have sucrose in our soft drinks in New Zealand. I believe you are correct with your statement about corn subsidies being the reason in the US.
Someone a year or so in the comments here posted up a link to a documentary that ran in England where they followed overeating studies. The subjects were people who couldnāt gain weight to save their lives. It was fascinating because some of these naturally thin people - who were forced to eat double their normal intake - actually gained all their weight as muscle even though they were forbidden to exercise. Some people had to drop out because they would throw up the extra food or just could not tolerate eating that much.
Anyway, reading the linked article nowā¦thanks!
But HFCS isnāt really prevalent in actual home cooking. (Iām just lumping straight corn syrup in here for simplicity sake.) There are a few things that explicitly call for it, like pecan pie. Really there are specific advantages to using corn syrup, like better moisture retention and less crystallization of sugar in the finished product. So for things like a pecan pie or a frosting it makes sense (and even in the case of frosting you are using a very small ration of real sugar to syrup).
The problem is the fact that all those nice qualities have been exploited by your big food chemical labs which is why you see it in everything. That and itās cheaper than real sugar. Sure 50 years ago we didnāt eat that much HFCS, at the same time we didnāt have nearly the selection of pre-made processed foods we have today. Itās great for shelf stable food with more than a year life span.
Iāve watched this and it really blows my mind, especially as an over weight person. The scenes where people are actually having issues getting down food, even once they realize they have to be eating calorically dense foods, well I was just amazed. They were talking like 4k-5k calories a day, which Iām not sure would be a problem for me. A little real butter and heavy cream goes a long way toward that.
Thatās an interesting study.
Iāve been for the past year or so focusing on eating more real food and pretty much limiting any kind of processed food - especially sweets. Itās not that hard to mix up brownies or whatever.I havenāt cut out processed sugar - we ate it when we were young and people were not obese. I have been more interested in not eating deodorized oils but really just the cheap ingredients in general. We joined a farm CSA and itās incredible the difference from the vegetables they sell at the grocery store - even my veggie hating husband and kid gobble up the food because it all tastes so good. I do still eat some things processed - sometimes a box of Mac N Cheese is just easy - but Iām happy to have reduced it. My weight hasnāt been affected but I still prefer to eat this way.
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I know - itās incredible to watch.
One thing about that Why Calories Count book thatās interesting is how they show this mountain of data shows that each time you lose weight you are destined to gain back even more. They talk about how even when people are in hospital settings and they can really control the calories precisely, that it is almost impossible to get long term weight loss. They say itās one of the reasons people who have been involved in weight loss for many years are hoping for some kind of pill, because there is obviously some mechanism in place to store weight that is almost impossible to circumvent.
I wasnāt saying it was common in home cooking. But sodas, pre-made foods, sauces, etc etc- lots and lots of corn syrup there. And for things where HFCS is replacing sugar, if it were necessary to quadruple it it would go along way to explain why we have so much more sugar in our diets.
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