High Fructose Corn Syrup

So this is my understanding of the seminar last night: High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is man-made from corn and is 55% Fructose and 45% Glucose. The difference between fructose and glucose is that when you eat glucose, it slowly enters your body at a healthy rate and goes to your brain, muscles, and liver. When you eat fructose, it doesn't go through at a steady rate; it goes in at the same rate you eat it and only goes straight to your liver. There is also a part of your body that sends signals to your brain when you eat telling it that you are eating and you don't need any more. Fructose goes straight through and that certain part of the body doesn't send those "Hey, you are eating" signals, so you don't know if you are getting full, which makes you want to eat more food (possibly with fructose to start the cycle again). Another thing we learned was that when you drink soda (which usually has HFCS), some of the fructose goes to the part of your body that makes you want to pee, which means you would pee more than you usually would when you drink water, and it would also dehydrate you. Also, the amount of Fructose has gone up very quickly. One of the slides showed a graph that started when humans started to develop and the present day earth. Back then, yearly consumption of fructose of one person (which was from fruits and veggies back then) was 7 lbs, and now it has gone up to 147 lbs. People make HFCS because it's cheap and tastes 5X sweeter than glucose. Glucose is actually healthier than Fructose, but people use it in many types of foods to make it tastes sweeter. One person asked: "If people want that little 'kick', then why don't they just add Glucose?" The answer was that it doesn't taste very sweet, and if people used Glucose, they would need to use a lot of it, which is still unhealthy. Another person asked "What about honey? Isn't honey natural?" The spokesperson told us that the flowers most people use for the bees to make honey don't usually come with nectar to drink. So they do what they do, spreading pollen, and apparently the bees drink HFCS and make honey out of that.

I'm so glad I went to this seminar because my dad and I learned so much about sugary things and answered so many questions I had but never found the answer to, like "How come one day I feel like eating more than the previous day if I haven't used huge amounts of energy?" And "Why does water seem more refreshing than soda?" I was proud to see many AHAMA students there like Daniel, Antonio, and Clark. I was also happy to see Serena, Jae Jae, Ann Marie, CHN Devlin, and Jordan there, and they weren't required to go. I saw the girls taking notes, which I was thought was amazing. I was also happy that all of the AHAMA students (except one little boy, wink wink) didn't bring soda. It was really funny because the spokesperson said "Before we begin, just a quick show of hands, who here brought soda?" and the 2 girls and I Instantly looked at that "boy" from AHAMA with soda in his hands. If you didn't go to the seminar this should bring you up to speed.

BTW, you can also see this on Yahoo.