The US food industry uses a lot of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). That worries a lot of people. There are two reasons why industry loves corn syrup:

• Liquid corn syrup is much easier to use in industrial production than granulated sugar.
• The US has production quotas on sugar beets/cane and subsidies on corn: these slightly increase the price of sucrose and slightly decrease the price of corn syrup.

High-fructose corn syrup is made from natural, high-glucose corn syrup by using enzymes to digest the glucose into fructose. Two kinds are made: HFCS-42, which is 42% fructose and less sweet than sucrose, and HFCS-90, which is 90% fructose and sweeter than sucrose. In food production, the two are mixed to get the right effect of sweetening, moistening and browning.

Because HFCS-90 is sweeter than sucrose, less of it has to be used. Mexican Coke, made with sucrose, has double the carbohydrates of American Coke, made with HFCS mixed to 55% fructose. Producing a product with less material that looks healthier on the label is another reason industry prefers HFCS.

Many people use honey, agave syrup or apple sauce instead of high-fructose corn syrup. But check out the sugar composition of various sweeteners and foods:

Honey is almost identical to HFCS-42 and agave syrup is close to HFCS-90. In fact, to check that honey hasn’t been adulterated with HFCS requires examining the carbon isotopes. Applesauce is mostly water and fibre, but it’s sweetness comes from unpolymerized fructose.

Just because products are less processed, doesn’t mean they’re any healthier for you: the reason we crave sugar is because it’s so hard to find in the wild. The problem isn’t high-fructose corn syrup, it’s that people eat too much sugar:

If you’re looking for a sweetener that’s more pretentious than table sugar and includes trace micronutrients, I think maple syrup is the way to go.

A lot of people I talk to don’t seem to understand sugar very well, so I’d like to take this opportunity to educate my readers. I’m going to simplify things because I don’t fully understand the biology and I don’t think you need to either.

The two most common simple sugars (monosaccharides) are glucose and fructose. Glucose is what cells input for energy. Fructose is metabolized in the liver into either glucose or fatty tissue. Transport of fructose to the liver appears to be sped up by the presence of some glucose. So it’s best to eat fructose without glucose.

The liver prioritizes metabolism into glucose, but it makes the decision based on the glucose level in the liver itself. The issue is that when a large amount of fructose is digested, the liver bottlenecks and produces fatty tissue. The liver also prioritizes metabolism of fructose over other activities. So it’s better to eat glucose than fructose. (Excess glucose is also metabolized into fatty tissue by the liver, but without the bottleneck much less dietary glucose should end up as fat.)

Simple sugars combine (polymerize) into complex sugars (polysaccharides). The most common one is sucrose = 1 glucose + 1 fructose. Sucrose is broken down into glucose and fructose in the stomach, which takes time; there’s some evidence that this digestion is regulated by blood sugar levels. So it’s better to eat sucrose than glucose and fructose unpolymerized.

Glucose is 75% as sweet and fructose is 175% as sweet as sucrose. So if you’re cooking with fructose, you don’t need to use as much.

I’ve written the above conclusions from the point of view of someone who doesn’t want to get fat. If you’ve just expended significant energy through exercise, you want to get glucose to your muscles (including your heart) as fast as possible so they can start repairing themselves. Some athletes like to chug maltodextrin = glucose + glucose + glucose + …, which has the emergent property of being not sweet at all.