An interesting study came out recently. You can read about it here on dLife. In a nutshell, it says that sodas containing high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) have high levels of a reactive compound that has been shown by others to have the potential to cause damage that may lead to diabetes. A very interesting aside is that one of the active compounds in green tea, EGCG, reduces those compounds substantially.

This really piqued my interest because I began to question HFCS a year or more ago due to some reading I'd done. Much like trans-fats, this stuff looks ok because it's based on real foods. It sounds innocuous - after all fructose is the sugar in fruit, right? And corn/maize is the original all-American food. BUT, and it's a big but, it is chemically altered. It's not like you can buy a bushel of corn on the cob and cook some HFCS up in your kitchen.

Food companies love this stuff for several reasons. It's cheaper than sugar (at least until Biodiesel gains popularity), it blends more easily than sucrose, it's sweeter and has a longer shelf life than table sugar. It began to appear in foods from 1975 - 1985. This timing fits right in with the type 2 epidemic, as well as the beginnings of the obesity epidemic. Other studies have linked fructose with insulin sensitivity as well as obesity.

If you're a label-reader, you know that HFCS is in A LOT of foods. It's hard to find a whole wheat bread without it, for instance. I started trying to eliminate it, or at least cut back a year ago and it really is everywhere. If it's not in the first 5 or 7 ingredients, it's probably ok, or at least better for me. Another rule of thumb I've been using is that if I can't cook it in my own kitchen, I'm not eating it.

It's too late for me as far as not developing diabetes, but it's not too late to protect my health from what 35 more years of this stuff might do to me. Read up on it, do your own research, ask your doctor his or her opinion and read those labels!