High Fructose Corn Syrup

When the 1970s introduced High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), a cheap sweetener alternative to sucrose in a fructose-glucose liquid form (fifty five percent fructose, forty two percent glucose, and three percent saccharides), it brought extensive numbers of health problems with it (Bray, 2004 & Johnson, 2010 ). Prior to the 70’s, on average, sugar contributed to four percent of daily caloric intake, however over the past four and a half decades, this statistic has increased to whopping sixteen percent, leading some scientist to consider it an “addiction” as they observe the sugar substitute wreak havoc on humans’ bodies worldwide (Butler, 2011). Along with hooking those who indulge sweets to it, High Fructose Corn Syrup also leads to obesity:

In fact, through a recent study at Princeton University, after observing changes in rats that consumed high fructose corn syrup, scientists were able to conclude that the cheap sugar substitute has addicting effects on the brain “similar to some drugs of abuse” (Parker, 2010). Behaviors that individuals who take in excess amounts of HFCS encounter such as binge eating, withdrawal, and craving, for instance, all relate to the same neurochemical change, where enkephalin mRNA, dopamine, and acetylcholine release in the nucleus accumbens, in the brain that occur in humans addicted to drugs (Avena, 2007). Thus, in the same way that a drug fiend depends on drugs humans begin to depend on High Fructose Corn Syrup, both needing their daily fix which is especially apparent in the growing number of overweight people since HFCS became present in nearly every processed food (Avena,