Tuesday, November 3, 2009
HFCS - natural?
Dave Babcock at Food Safety News wrote a great article about the legal fights over whether or not high fructose corn syrup is "natural" - and if it can be marketed as such. Babcock discusses the New Jersey case against Snapple's "all-natural" claim regarding their drinks. (Snapple has since switched to using sugar in their beverages.) Some might argue that a sweetener produced in a lab with the synthetic enzyme glucose-isomerase hardly seems natural. Since the FDA decided in 2003 to allow HFCS to fall into the "natural basket" - defined as "nothing artificial or synthetic has been added to a food that would not normally be expected to be in the food" (58 Fed. Reg. 2302, 2407) - Snapple claimed federal preemption of the NJ laws against fraud, and the District Court agreed that the FDA had created "field preemption." The 3rd Circuit overturned and remanded to the District Court. Check out the full article here.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
My friend Luke (awesome personal trainer!) says:
ReplyDelete"Anyone who says that HFCS is the same as sugar is a lying mo-fo.
"It's made from corn and it's the same as sugar" is what the public relations jackals are saying.
Although these sugars don't have the extremely high glycemic index of raw glucose, they do cause a combination of hyper-insulinemia and aberrant intracellular metabolism, which in turn creates the double-whammy of lipogenesis (fat creation) and glycation (gummed up body proteins).
I say that HFCS isn't natural at all, but then, I'm a health professional, not a legalman.
If you're interested in the HEALTH aspects of HFCS"
- then email me (Sarah) and I'll send you the list of articles Luke cites.