Food manufacturers love it, because it enhances their profits, so they add it into number of foods like: cereals, candy bars, ketchup, cookies, sweetened drinks and mainly soda.

HFCS is a man-made sweetener that’s cheaper and sweeter than sugar. It is a true junk food.

HFCS is very, very, really, really, really bad for you. That’s because it’s packed with calories, but your body doesn’t  recognize these calories.

HFCS shuts off your body’s natural appetite control  system, so you can eat and eat more than your body would normally be able to handle. And that makes people fat.

Unlike glucose, your body does not use fructose as an immediate source of energy, it metabolizes it into fat.

When you eat any carbohydrate, whether it contains glucose or starch, your body releases insulin to regulate your body weight. First, it tries to push the carbs into your muscle cells to be used as energy and also stores it in the liver for later use. Than it suppresses your appetite, telling your body that you’ve had enough. Finally, it stimulates production of leptin. Leptin helps regulate how much fat you store and helps increase your metabolism to keep your weight on check.

High-fructose corn syrup doesn’t stimulate insulin and therefore doesn’t increase production of leptin.  And without insulin and leptin, your body has no shut-off mechanism. You can drink 5 liters of Sprite or Coke, or eat  a half a gallon of ice cream and you body thinks you haven’t eaten anything at all.

Soft drinks are one of the main sources of HFCS.  Even if you aren’t a soda drinker, HFCS could be in other products you use.

Read nutritional label: If label says “sugar” or “cane sugar,” the product contains sucrose, which is a 50/50 blend of glucose and fructose. That’s not such a big problem. But if HFCS is listed first or second, look at the chart on the nutrition label to see how much sugar the food contains. If it’s just 2 or 3 grams, that’s not that bad. But if you see a food that has 9 or more grams of sugar and HFCS is prominent on the list of ingredients, stay away from that stuff.

Your body can deal with a little bit of anything, but when your HFCS intake is big, you are heading for trouble.

Here are some of the foods high in HFCS or fructose:

• Soft drinks (like coke, sprite, pepsi)

• Commercial candy ( like skittles, starburst, jelly beans)

• Sweetened drinks ( like lipton ice tea, kerns juices)

• Some fruit flavored yogurts

• Some ice creams

• Highly sweetened cereals

• Ketchup

More about carbohydrates:

• Choosing your carbohydrates, part 1.
• Choosing your carbohydrates, part 2.

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