Production Of High Fructose Corn Syrup

Emily Carter

Justin Latici

WRTG 1150

26 October 2016 Corn Production in America Every summer since I was little my family and I have taken a road trip to my uncle’s lake house in Missouri. Being from Colorado, it is about a twelve hour drive, six of which we only have corn outside the window to look at. It is terribly boring but also gets me thinking about how much corn is actually being produced in the United States. My family and I eat a lot of corn with our meals, whether it’s steamed or on the cob, or as an ingredient in other foods and multiplying that by the 124.6 million households there are in the US, that’s a lot of corn. This is not to mention exporting it to other countries, considering the US exports about twenty percent of

High fructose corn syrup is, as the name implies, corn syrup whose glucose has been partially changed into a different sugar, fructose. High fructose corn syrup is composed of either forty-two percent or fifty-five percent fructose with the remaining percentage being glucose. This is almost identical to table sugar which is fifty percent glucose and fifty percent fructose. The sweetness of fructose allows for more flavor with less product which is why it is a header alternative to regular glucose. Most of the corn used to make High fructose corn syrup comes from genetically modified corn. To make High fructose corn syrup, you start with corn, then mill it to produce corn starch. Then the cornstarch is mixed with water and an enzyme is added to break the starch down into shorter chains of glucose. Then you add another enzyme, produced by a fungus, that breaks the short chains down into glucose molecules. At that point, you have regular corn syrup but to make the corn syrup into high fructose corn syrup, you turn some of its glucose molecules into fructose molecules by adding another enzyme to the syrup. This enzyme converts the glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 53 percent glucose, with some other sugars as well. This syrup, called high fructose corn syrup 42, is about as sweet as natural sugar (sucrose) and is used in foods and bakery items. High fructose corn

The assumption that fructose and high fructose corn syrup was similar or better than table sugar is inaccurate. The liver converts fructose directly into fat and people who consume lots of fructose end up developing high blood pressure, suffering from obesity, and developing insulin resistance, among other health issues. In the past thirty years, the obesity rates in the US have sky-rocketed. Medical bills to treat diseases associated with obesity are more than $200 billion annually now. Much of the obesity problem lies in food additives like fructose which food companies are so eager to put in their products because of the cheap production cost. Fructose, since it is sweeter, also causes us to desire sweeter and sweeter foods to satisfy that taste while also limiting the secretion of leptin, a hormone which tells our brains we are full. Furthermore, mercury is used in the production process of many types of fructose. So products which contain fructose also often contain traces of mercury