High-Fructose Corn Syrup - the Controversy

I guess, or maybe I just don't see ecology as a matter of natural environments that somehow, magically, can respond to any condition or change in conditions - except for the ones humans create. Can humans wreak incredible damage to their environments? Yes, of course - but so can insects. Humans can dam streams, but beavers do, too.It's fairly rare for an ecology to turn on the survival or extinction of a single species, or even a handful of species. When an ecology is structured like that it's evidence of decay, of fragility. It's like a diseased antelope, soon to be culled by the hyenas.So I guess what I'm saying is - I don't care if Bt washes into streams. Bt has always washed into streams. Is it worth monitoring? Of course it is, and I hope that research continues. I strongly suspect it will be, funded largely by the companies who produce GMO's. But anything we do in the world is going to have an effect. And there will be effects - changes that occur to natural ecology - in the world long after the last human is gone. Maybe our actions will change our ecologies in ways we don't like, and we should be on the lookout for that. But just changing things isn't inherently bad.We're probably a bit off-topic, here.

HFCS contains no sucrose at all.

Yes, but that's not necessarily going to translate into an increased consumption of fructose. Since fructose is sweeter than sucrose (almost twice as sweet, in fact) it might very well mean a decrease in the consumption of both fructose and glucose.

It's possible, but even if that were true, I don't think it would matter. When you drink soda, do you drink until you stop being hungry? Or do you drink until you stop being thirsty? Or, in fact, don't you drink until the container is empty? If you eat an apple - high in fructose - do you stop about 4/5ths of the way through when you stop being so hungry, or do you eat the entire apple, regardless of its size?In experiments, you can make people eat about four times as much soup as they normally would, simply by using a "trick bowl" - fed from the bottom by a secret tube that replaces the soup in the bowl as they eat - that keeps the soup in the bowl at a certain level. In other words, your brain tricks you into being just as hungry as it takes to finish all of the food that is in front of you.So replacing some amount of glucose with a smaller amount of fructose, in practice, isn't going to make you eat any more. You were always going to eat the whole cheeseburger and fries, simply because they're in front of you. You were always going to finish off the whole can of soda regardless of what is being used to sweeten it.