Why is HFCS bad for you?

I know high fructose corn syrup is bad for you, but why? Also what foods tend to contain it?

It's really no worse for you than any other kind of sugar. It's essentially just super concentrated fructose.

Most foods that are processed contain HFCS. You have to read labels if you truly want to avoid it. 

It is said that HFCS makes you hungrier.

All sugar makes you hungrier.

I think there is emerging evidence that concentrated fructose, be it in corn syrup or in sucrose, is not as easily metabolised by the body as other sugars (eg glucose)

YOu might want to read the transcript of this radio program. It discusses the way in which Frutose is metabolised, and how this is fundamentally different to the way in which glucose is metabolised. Fructose is then degraded in the liver (and only the liver) Whereas glucose is taken up by all organs (including the liver). the products of fructose are easily converted to fat.
(btw sucrose is made up of one unit of glucose and one of fructose joined together)

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories /2007/1969924.h tm

also if you are more chemically minded http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/Bio logyPages/C/Car bohydrates.html might also be interesting to you.

When you count calories HFC doesn't matter however in an environment where you are eating when you are hungry there is some evidence that HFCS leads to overconsumption more so than even glucose or surcose. This wouldn't be much of an issue if HFC was rarely used or consumed.  However from 1967 HFC food consumption has increased 1000%. Hence some cause for concern.

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/79/4/537

"In this article, we address an important potential hypothesis by which HFCS may have an environmental link with the epidemic of obesity. When total calorie intake is fixed, ie, if a person eats the same amount of fructose, glucose, or sucrose in a metabolically controlled setting, the response should be the same, and this was shown by McDevitt et al (46). This situation is not one in which differences in taste and portion size are allowed to operate. However, many biological factors that we noted in this article suggest that calorically sweetened beverages are associated with overconsumption when the sweetener is in a liquid form (29–32). The collective data suggest that overconsumption of beverages sweetened with HFCS and containing > 50% free fructose and the increased intake of total fructose may play a role in the epidemic of obesity. Whether HFCS used in solid food produces the same overconsumption as it does in beverages is unknown, but we suspect that if the HFCS was entirely in the solid form, it would not pose the same problem (30). Total fructose, both free fructose and fructose combined in sucrose, in both beverages and solid food may be viewed as a precursor to fat because of the ease with which the carbon skeleton of fructose can form the backbone for triacylglycerols and be used for the synthesis of long-chain fatty acids (25). Additional clinical trials are clearly needed to buttress the conclusions of Raben et al (32) that beverages containing sugar caused more weight gain over 10 wk than did diet beverages."

 

duh..........and I thought for years that fructose meant it was better cause it was sugar from fruit.  I was, "oh goody, frutose, so its healthy"

I keep learning SO much on here.................

Sugar from fruit isn't healthy if you eat too much.  An apple a day is reasonable.  Drinking the juice of 8 apples as a beverage (or equivalent in sugary drinks) isn't.   One 4 oz. apple is 60 calories; a quart of apple juice is 480 calories; a 1 L Pepsi is 400 calories.  Milk is a healther beverage because of the protein it contains along with the lactose sugar, but it's still a load of calories: a quart of skim is 360 calories, a quart of 2% is 480 calories, and a quart of whole milk is a whopping 600 calories.