Photo by uzi978/Flickr CC
Thanks to Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, for alerting me to the current HFCS-free sales boom. HFCS, of course, is High Fructose Corn Syrup, the liquid sweetener made from corn (see previous posts). Food marketers have gotten the message that many people consider HFCS to be the new trans fat, even though it is not much different biologically from common table sugar (sucrose).
HFCS is replaced easily by sucrose, which used to be much more expensive. Now, because of the use of corn for ethanol, sucrose is only slightly more expensive than HFCS.
Click on the table to see the overall 13 percent growth in sales over the last year, with products like HFCS-free milk drinks, juices, salad dressings, and teas registering 1,500 percent to 16,000 percent increases. Like "trans fat-free," the term "HFCS-free" is a calorie distractor. It, too, will make you forget about the calories.
The irony is that white table sugar--formerly a leading target of "eat less" messages--suddenly has a health aura. Marketers have wasted no time moving in to use that aura to sell the same old products.
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I've had a torrid love affair with sugar for most of my life, but we've been especially hot-and-heavy in the last several years. I KNOW that it is not good for me. I read the reports and recognize that it causes a host of issues, diabetes being among the worst. For some reason, HFCS terrifies me even more than sugar and I do my best to distance myself from it at all costs. I even wrote a blog post on it over at the green social network, www.greenwala.com -- here's the article link if you want to take a look: http://tinyurl.com/lhufb4
Do I forget about the calories when I see that a product, like Orowheat bread, is now boasting that they are HFCS-free? Absolutely not. But it does give me more peace of mind. Prior to HFCS, diabetes was a very uncommon illness. In the last 30 years however, it has found its way into every corner of our diets. Is it really any coincidence that rates of diabetes have skyrocketed?? Seems really unlikely....