Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast, a show where we take a closer look at

nutrition news, research, and trends so that you can make more informed decisions about what you eat.

I'm your host, Monica Reinagle, and having now been in the business and on this beat for almost 20 years,

one of the things that I've noticed is the cyclical nature of certain nutrition concerns

and the misinformation that often accompanies them. For example, early on in my time doing this podcast, I dedicated several episodes

to high fructose corn syrup. And then this particular concern seemed to fade a bit from the public

consciousness. But now recent events have revived the conversation about banning high fructose corn syrup from the food supply.

And some of the arguments for this position are not based in scientific fact.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to revisit this topic and clarify some of the most common misperceptions. When you are cooking or baking

at home and your recipe calls for sugar, you will probably use what's known as table sugar.

And that comes from either sugar cane or beets. But regardless of the source, table sugar is sucrose. This is a two-sugar

molecule, or a disaccharide, and it's made up of one molecule of glucose joined with one molecule of

fructose. Now, food manufacturers, on the other hand, are more likely to use high fructose corn syrup

than they are to use cane or beet sugar, table sugar, primarily because high fructose corn syrup is a lot

cheaper. Now, high fructose corn syrup has sometimes been blamed for fueling a dramatic rise in obesity and

type 2 diabetes, largely because the widespread adoption of high fructose corn syrup in food

manufacturing largely coincided with a rise in those disease rates.

Of course, this is merely a correlation. However, this argument

was bolstered by the observation that a high intake of fructose can lead to the accumulation of liver

fats and other metabolic damage, which could contribute to obesity or type 2 diabetes. You see, fructose is metabolized a little

differently than other sugars. Unlike glucose, which is converted into energy in the cells,

fructose is metabolized in the liver. And if you overload the liver with a whole bunch of fructose, that could indeed lead to all kinds of

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