In 1957, two chemists from the Clinton Corn Processing Company of Clinton, Iowa,

developed a system for converting the glucose found in cornstarch into fructose.

Over 60 years later, the product they created can be found in a dizzying array of food products all over the world.

Learn more about high fructose corn syrup, how it's made, how it's used, and the controversy surrounding

it on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. I'm going to go and Early humans ate very little sugar. No matter where you lived your diet consisted of some

combination of meat, grain, vegetables, dairy, and

nuts. Even fruit, which does have sugar, was only available in season and even then

they weren't eating the same type of fruits that were eating today. Modern fruits were cross-bred

over centuries to be higher in sugar content than they would have been in nature.

Despite not consuming very much sugar, humans really like sugar. It was much of the

of the reason for the European expansion into the Western Hemisphere.

The problem with sugar is that it's very picky about where it can be grown.

Sugar cane needs a tropical climate which naturally limits how much of it can be grown.

This limited sugar to being a luxury product until the 19th century.

The thing which increased sugar consumption was the development of beet sugar from sugar beets.

This allowed sugar to be produced in non-tropical areas.

As successful as beet sugar was, there were some who thought that maybe there was even a better way to produce a sweetener.

This led to chemists, Richard Marshall and Earl Coe of the Clinton Corn Processing Company of Clinton

Iowa, to develop a process that could turn glucose found in

cornstarch into fructose. The process they developed wasn't something that could

easily scale up to mass production, but it showed enormous potential. The potential was in the vast size of the corn crop.

Corn, also known as maize, is one of the world's largest crops.

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