New Pepsi line? Throw it back!

So PepsiCo is launching a new line of sodas that are made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Should we celebrate the company's newfound health consciousness? Hardly! The new sodas are still full of empty calories from sugar. Sugar is not health food, natural or not. Lard is natural, too, but I don't see people extolling its virtues and buying it in bulk.


People have gotten the idea that HFCS is worse than sugar, because it is allegedly metabolized differently by the body and leads to weight gain. HFCS has been partially blamed for the obesity epidemic, and rightly so, but it is not because it is inherently different from sugar, but because of the way it changed the food supply when it came on the market. HFCS is much less expensive than sugar. When HFCS became available, it enabled food manufacturers to sell sugary foods and drinks at much lower prices than they used to. This likely led people to start consuming a lot more calories from HFCS-sweetened products. As nutrition expert Dr. David Katz has explained, its cost-effectiveness also led to its widespread use in processed foods, even those that are not supposed to be sweet. The result is that we end up consuming more sugar overall. So, HFCS may have played a role in the rising prevalence of obesity and diabetes in the U.S., but sugar could have had the same effect if it were used in the same way ("Sweet and Corny").


There is no empirical evidence that HFCS is any worse than sugar or that it has any different effects on appetite, weight, or other metabolic factors. The abstract from a review of studies on HFCS published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had this to say:


"High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has been implicated in excess weight gain through mechanisms seen in some acute feeding studies and by virtue of its abundance in the food supply during years of increasing obesity. Compared with pure glucose, fructose is thought to be associated with insufficient secretion of insulin and leptin and suppression of ghrelin. However, when HFCS is compared with sucrose, the more commonly consumed sweetener, such differences are not apparent, and appetite and energy intake do not differ in the short-term. Longer-term studies on connections between HFCS, potential mechanisms, and body weight have not been conducted. The main objective of this review was to examine collective data on associations between consumption of HFCS and energy balance, with particular focus on energy intake and its regulation" (Melanson et al., 2008).


Bottom line: Stick to diet soda or no soda at all! What? Afraid of artificial sweeteners? See the post below.