Brian Laird on WNYC, here's a new way the government may confuse you into getting diabetes.

President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr. are praising the announcement by the Coca-Cola company that they will start using more cane sugar and less high-fructose corn syrup.

Trump explicitly pushed for the change, will explain why, we'll talk to the dean, the queen, perhaps the greatest of all time on the intersection of public health

and U.S. food politics, Marian Nessel. In just a minute, I'll just mention that the Coca-Cola

CEO, James Quincy, announcing the move to U.S. produced cane sugar, acknowledged that the Trump

administration pressure was a factor in the decision.

Marian Nessel, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health Emerita at NYU,

and the author of many books, including the forthcoming What to Eat Now,

The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters.

joins us now. Her website is foodpolitics.com.

She has been on the show many times going back to at least her classic book,

Food Politics in 2004, and I suspect that wasn't the first time,

but my database doesn't go back any further than that.

Marion, always great to have you, and thank you for all the education and enlightenment

you've given our listeners over the years. Welcome back to WNYC. Thanks, and thanks for the lovely introduction.

What is high fructose corn syrup? It's a sweetener produced from corn, from corn starch.

You take corn starch and treat it with enzymes to turn it into glucose glucose and then you take more enzymes and turn some of that glucose into fructose.

And you have a liquid sweetener that resembles cane or beet sugar, sucrose, because both of them have glucose and fructose in slightly different proportions, but I don't think meaningfully different.

Why the tag high fructose? What does high mean? Well, it actually means lower and sometimes

than the amount that's in table sugar. Table sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.

High fructose corn syrup can be as high as 55% fructose.

But that's pretty much maybe a little bit higher.

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