Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - High Fructose Corn Syrup (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. In 1957, two chemists from the Clinton Corn Processing Company of Clinton, Iowa, developed a system for converting the glucose found in corn starch 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. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:54 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Despite not consuming very much sugar, humans really like sugar. It was much 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. Sugarcane 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 Cui, of the Clinton Corn Processing Company of Clinton, Iowa to develop a process that could turn glucose found

Starting point is 00:02:16 in corn starch 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. It's the second largest crop in terms of acreage in the world and the largest in the United States. Here I should explain what fructose is. Fructose is the type of sugar known as a monosaccharide. A monosaccharide is a simple form of sugar and are the building blocks of all carbohydrates. There are three monosaccharides, glucose, fructose, and galactose. The stuff we call table sugar is sucrose, which is a disaccharide, made up of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule.

Starting point is 00:03:03 These building blocks can be made into even more complicated molecules called polysaccharides, which include things like starch and cellulose. and more on chemistry in a bit. Yoshiyushi Takasaki from the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology improved on the process for converting corn starch into fructose. This allowed for the mass production of fructose at scale. And this led to the creation of high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, in 1967. High fructose corn syrup is not the same as corn syrup.

Starting point is 00:03:35 Corn syrup, the kind that you might buy in a store, is thicker and is a mixture of many different types of sugars. High fructose corn syrup is made from corn syrup, which is made from corn starch. It's created from enzymes that break up the corn syrup into pure fructose. The Clinton corn processing company began to market high fructose corn syrup in the early 1970s. From a business standpoint, high fructose corn syrup has several major advantages over sugar. First, it's cheaper, significantly cheaper. This is especially true in the United States, which you will see in just a bit. Second, it's easier to handle. It's a liquid instead of a solid, which means it can be transported in tanker cars, pumped, piped, and added to mixtures for easier processing. And finally,

Starting point is 00:04:18 it's sweeter. Because it's sweeter, you don't need as much of it to get the same level of sweetness in a product. Or conversely, you can make something more sweeter with the same amount. The introduction of high fructose corn syrup wasn't an immediate hit. What helped it along were several events that were seemingly unrelated. The first was the sale of corn in 1970s. by the United States to the Soviet Union. This was a massive amount of corn which caused the price to spike. Farmers began planting as much corn as possible to meet the new demand. A few years later, corn subsidies were increased, encouraging farmers to continue planting corn, fensro to fensro, because they had guaranteed money. With all of that corn being produced, there was a need to

Starting point is 00:05:00 find more markets for it. Large agribusiness companies like Archer Daniel Midland pursued two major markets, ethanol and high fructose corn syrup. The production of ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup actually isn't radically different. In the case of ethanol, the wet mass of corn starch is allowed to ferment into alcohol, and an enzyme is simply added with high-fructose corn syrup. Ethanol didn't take off immediately because gas prices fell after the 1970s oil embargoes. High-fructose corn syrup didn't take off either because world sugar prices plummeted. After a peak in 1974 of 65 cents a pound, it dropped to 9 cents a pound.

Starting point is 00:05:35 However, in 1981, quotas were placed on sugar imports into the United States, and overnight, sugar became more expensive than high-fructose corn syrup in American markets. By 1984, both Coke and Pepsi had switched from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup as the sweetener for their soft drinks. While they didn't run advertisements announcing the switch, they also weren't really hiding the fact. There were write-ups in publications like the Wall Street Journal, and to be completely honest, most people had no idea that the sweetener had been changed.

Starting point is 00:06:08 The 80s were the decade where high fructose corn syrup really took off. In 1977, the average American consumed 9.6 pounds of high fructose corn syrup per year. By 1990, they were consuming almost 50 pounds per year. The consumption and use of high fructose corn syrup continued with more and more food products. And it's only a slight exaggeration to say that high fructose corn syrup is in everything. If there's anything that's remotely sweet and any sort of processed food, it's likely that it's made out of high fructose corn syrup. That maple syrup you enjoy on pancakes and waffles, if you look closely, it probably only says maple flavored, and the number one or number

Starting point is 00:06:48 two ingredient is high fructose corn syrup. Condiments such as ketchup and barbecue sauce have it, jams and jellies have it, breakfast cereals, fruit juices, applesauce, and ice cream all use high fructose corn syrup. However, it isn't just in sweet products. It's a host of products that you would probably never expect it. Chicken nuggets and other pre-packaged meats such as deli meats have high-fructose corn syrup. Breads, crackers, and other baked goods all have high-fructose corn syrup added. Salad dressing, soup, yogurt, canned vegetables, canned fruit, cottage cheese, peanut butter, pickles, and many, many other products all have high-fructose corn syrup as an ingredient.

Starting point is 00:07:26 In fact, I encourage you the next time you eat anything which comes packaged or pre-made to look at the ingredients. odds are you will find high-fructose corn syrup, or if not, soybean oil, which is another episode. While the high-fructose corn syrup revolution started in the United States, it has spread worldwide. The United States exports the majority of high-fructose corn syrup in the world at 71% of the global market share. But other world leaders include Canada, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea. So there's a lot of high-fructose corn syrup and food products. So what's the big deal?

Starting point is 00:07:59 Before I get into that, let me go back to a little bit of chemistry and biology. biology. The way our bodies metabolize any carbohydrate, including fructose, is that it has to convert everything into glucose. This is done in our livers. However, we can only keep so much glucose in our bodies. On average, there's only about one teaspoon of glucose in our bloodstream at any given time. A bit is stored in our muscles and liver, and the rest is converted into fat by the hormone insulin. For this reason, many people blame the global rise in obesity rates on high fructose corn syrup consumption, or at least consider it to be a significant contributing factor. There is certainly a strong correlation between high fructose corn syrup

Starting point is 00:08:37 consumption and obesity rates. But if you remember back to my episode on correlation not necessarily implying causation, just because two factors increase together does not mean that one thing caused the other. So what could be the causal reason why high fructose corn syrup causes obesity? There are two reasons usually given, and both of them could be true. The first is that there's something unique about fructose that's different from sucrose. There might be something in the process of metabolizing fructose that is worse than just consuming regular table sugar. There have been many studies linking high fructose corn syrup to cancer, heart disease, and a host of other problems, but again, they only show correlation, not any sort of causation. The second, and probably

Starting point is 00:09:19 a large contributing factor, is that we consume so much high fructose corn syrup. The average American consumes 40 pounds or 18 kilograms per year, and some countries are even higher. Before the creation of industrial-produced sweeteners, it would have been almost impossible for someone to consume that much fructose. The cheap cost of high-fructose corn syrup has made it ubiquitous, and allowed for such abnormally high consumption rates. It might simply be a matter of eating too much because it's been put into everything. Placing high-fructose corn syrup into so many different food products isn't necessarily a conspiracy. It's just business. Due to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies, high-fructose corn syrup became the cheapest option as a sweetener. And the reason it's

Starting point is 00:10:04 in so many products? Because people like it. People like sweet foods. High-fructose corn syrup consumption has decreased over the last 20 years, but it's still extremely high, far higher than it was, say, 50 or 60 years ago. Nonetheless, absent changes in corn subsidies or sugar tariffs, economics will dictate that high fructose corn syrup will remain the preferred sweetener in most of the world for the foreseeable future. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon.

Starting point is 00:10:43 Your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified of future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - High Fructose Corn Syrup (Encore)

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