You should do a SciShow episode on HOW the body metabolizes sugar vs high fructose corn syrup. The chemical reactions involved, and how it is stored. I think that would be more conclusive to your argument.
there is no difference in a vacuum, however, if you look at some specific sources like fruit, they contain things like fiber that change how your body metabolizes sugars
@@corvusclones Yes there is, your body needs to convert the fructose into glucose to be absorbed by the cells, the conversion requires enzymes and more byproducts, fructose also doesn't spike your insulin as much as glucose, hence creates more complications in your blood stream, that was just on top of my head, if you have some time, google for more info, happy new year!
@@moussaaili2492 please dont lie/makes things up, fructose is processed in your liver. It is almost exclusively processed in the liver. It typically is used for forming glycogen or trygliceride synthesis instead of short term energy, it doesn't do much of anything to your blood stream. While this is a complicated issue, you are right that it's pretty easy to verify with google. Why make something up and end it with a call for people to look up what you didn't?
@@corvusclones Al ot of studies showed that fructose after getting into liver through your BLOOD STREAM, causes many issues because the liver requires to convert it to glucose( glycogen if you wanna go more Biology terms) so it can be used by mitochondrial, in small amounts it doesn't harm since it's converted through fructogenesis like you mentioned to triglycerides and glucose, however, studies showed that combining it with glucose, the intestines absorb more of it that pure fructose, I am not sure where you get your facts, but mine are from universities' journals, and I didn't call you a liar so please be curtious if it's not too hard, happy new year.
@@moussaaili2492 I'm not sure what you mean by "going through the bloodstream" given that glycogen, which I'm not sure you understand because while it is composed of exclusively glucose molecules, it's pretty much the same with plant walls, chitin, and starch. In the case of glycogen, it uses 1,4 alpha glycosidic linkages to store fuel in a way that it can be easily broken down(not like the beta bonds in cell walls and chitin), in fact, even though you seem like you think glucose is dangerous, glycogen is the main long term storage for energy in your body and I'm not sure a human could live without a pretty large amount of it. They certainly wouldn't be healthy or able to exercise/do much that required exertion. You asked me not to accuse you of lying, but you keep using the term "blood stream" and emphasising it. It's very clear that you are referring to the circulatory system, but the pathway from the stomach to liver, while it carries blood, is it's own portal veneos pathway. Though it is possible that you aren't being dishonest, it's possible that you just keep commenting without understanding what you are saying, in which case I emplore you to stop. Don't spread misinformation, if you care about a topic, study it more carefully, learn how it really works rather than just what aspects of it you can twist to fit the narrative of your preconcieved notions
High fructose corn syrup isn't "wonderfully cheap," and it isn't JUST because of the subsidies that it's used. It's also because sugar producers demanded an import tariff that made sugar too expensive. Soft drink makers, among others, switched to corn syrup to save money and ended up making the corn farmers dependent on the import tariff on sugar as well. Of course not every manufacturer that used corn syrup as a raw material could switch, especially candy makers so their costs soared. Eventually some major ones ended up moving their factories to other countries to save money on sugar (labor is generally cheaper too but not, by itself, enough to make them leave). A big example of this is Brachs which left Illinois and took hundreds of jobs with it. Whatever its health effects, the economics of high fructose corn syrup is a mess. Also, technically I think there actually is a tiny amount of hfcs in that corn dog, though it probably rounds down to 0 grams.
I grew up in the 80s & 90s, when Fat Free was the fad, too. My parents were constantly on a diet & I became afraid of fat & developed an eating disorder in my teens. My grandmother focused on eating healthy natural foods & leading an active lifestyle. Her Dad was a milkman & used to pour cream on his cereal & was never overweight & always had beautiful skin. She said fat is a natural part of the human diet & our bodies need it. (Go, Grandma!) She’d say, “[Look at the old farmers, Stacie. They ate bacon for breakfast, poured cream on their cereal, lived off the land…and we’re never overweight. It’s not the fat that’s bad, Stacie, it’s lifestyle changes. People lead more secondary lifestyles. It’s what people are eating & how much they’re eating & then having jobs where they sit at a desk all day. People aren’t moving like they used to…]” She was right! It wasn’t until recent years that I learned that a person can be overweight AND malnourished. Eating cheap heavily processed foods with little to no nutritive value messes with every system of the body & can cause all kinds of health problems, leaving a person to feel full but never satisfied. We live in a world of abundance. I got tired of tracking calories & keeping up with the latest diet fads. I got a science degree, learned how my body works & buy basic minimally processed ingredients, grow what I can& teach my kids to make everything from scratch- right down to bread & pasta. Sure, we buy candy bars & chips sometimes but keep them out of the house for the most part. I get a little pudgy in the winter but burn it off growing food inthe summer. I tell my kids, people evolved eating natural foods. If it doesn’t grow on a tree or in the dirt or you can’t catch it or kill it, you might want to reconsider eating it…or at least not eat it in abundance. Put the basic stuff in your body that you need to live & keep moving. You’ll feel like a million bucks, even when you start getting achey as you get older. It’s just sad because nutritious foods are expensive these days & people can’t afford to feed their families well. And people have lost touch with whatI remand to leads self sufficient lifestyle within just a few generations. I make my kids listen to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books on audible to help them realize that humans had hands inthe dirt until recent generations in the western world. Of course, they still want their screens more than anything. But hopefully one day when they’re older & wiser (God willing)they’ll look back & realize that Mom wasn’t such a but after all. We are what we eat. There’s an old saying that never went out of style. 😆 And I don’t know how to make fat free cookies either. Ridiculous!
I remember a dude from Australia that I used to work with pointed out how cheap food is here. I think he said a $6 steak in the US would cost like $15 in Australia. I think he moved here in the late 90s, so it might be different now. Either way, you can get like 5,000 calories at McDonald's for about $10, which is maybe 20 minutes of work for the average American.
@@Aeturnalis Tell that to the millions of Americans who are still making $7.25 an hour if they have a job at all. Maybe if you average out the incomes including the very rich you could get those numbers. But I can guarantee that few of the people who I know are making $30 an hour.
@Oscar Ortiz No I agree that class and social status determine what most people eat. It really is about how we are raised. But it bothers me when people try to say that most Americans are rich. There are already too many people around the world who think that the streets here are lined in gold. We don't need to be putting out any more false information about americans being insanely rich. The reality is that most are not.
Love your foody science videos! keep them coming I took a course in Food Science in college and I learned how companies make cookies fat free. The fats in cookies were replaced with carbohydrate gels and gums (such as carageen gum - which is made from seaweed) Gels have a semblance of the mouth feel of fat but the lower calorie content of 4kcals/g instead of 9 kcal/g, also making them conveniently lower in calories but much less tasty.
You said that the two types of sugar are chemically similar because they have the same components...one with them bonded together and the other not. It seems like that should make a HUGE difference. I mean, you don't take a mix of hydrogen and oxygen gasses and say that it's basically water. Right? Or, if you really want to stick with sugars, lactose is just a disaccharide composed of galactose and glucose. Neither galactose nor glucose causes any problems in someone with a lactose intolerance. It seems like the statement that they are similar requires more proof than was given.
Starch breaks down into glucose, too, right? I would say that the biological effect of eating starch is not the same as the biological effect of eating just glucose. I happen to have just finished eating a big bowl of pasta. If I had replaced that with a bowl of sugar with some pasta sauce on it, I would be feeling pretty sick right now. What I'm getting at is that flooding the body with simple sugars appears to be more damaging than giving it sugars which take some time to break down.
I was once told by a very reliable source, "Eat anything you want, as long as it's unhealthy." This source also happened to be my, sister who weighed 82 pounds at 5' 4".
Hey! Do a special on the "zero-calorie" sweeteners while you're at it! (Aspartame, Splenda, Sucralose, Stevia, etc...) There seems to be SO MANY misconceptions and myths going on about these, and I'd actually like to know more about them because... I'm guilty of consuming them way too often. I just hate sugary soda so it's a good alternative usually.
Could the increase in American obesity have to do with the simplicity of the HFCS on a molecular level, causing even more of an unstable metabolic impact on the body due to the lack of time needed to break the substance down before it entering the bloodstream? That's my best guess.
@Budo Ka and you honestly think it's just the murikans with more food and extra lazy lifestyles? And not to mention communist China successfully dodged the obesity problem cause most of their diet is plain rice. China's literally the rice bowl of the world? Anyways, just keep brainwashing yourself that it's just the lazy lifestyle and has nothing to do with body chemistry. Surely Humans are the laziest species on earth and thats whats driving is fat. Till you realize Humans are literally the least laziest species on Earth and we work more per day than most other species which are not half as diabetic as we are.
Health problems: High-fructose corn syrup contains free-form monosaccharides of fructose and glucose, so it cannot be considered biologically equivalent to conventional sugar which is just sucrose, which has a glycosidic bond that links the fructose and glucose together, and slows its break down in the body. Even if this metabolic difference were not present, every cell in your body uses glucose for energy, and it's metabolized in every organ of your body. About 20 percent of glucose is metabolized in your liver. Fructose, on the other hand, is entirely metabolized in your liver, because your liver is the only organ that has the transporter for it. Since all fructose gets shuttled to your liver, it ends up taxing and damaging your liver in the same way alcohol and other toxins do. And just like alcohol, fructose is metabolized directly into fat - not cellular energy, like glucose. So, eating fructose in excess of the very small amount our body can handle is really like eating fat - it just gets stored in your fat cells, which leads to mitochondrial malfunction, obesity and obesity-related diseases. And speaking of toxins, HFCS is loaded with them, due to the highly-chemical process of manufacturing it. It also increases your triglyceride levels and your LDL (bad) cholesterol. Fructose is relatively harmless in small quantities, but virtually all soda and processed foods are loaded with it so if you want to be healthy try eating real food instead.
I wish he'd gone into the rat study more, because it is true, and a big deal. The rats become obese compared to eating sugar or rat chow. The theory is that it's because of how highly processed HFCS is compared to sugar: your body has to do a lot less work to digest it. Either way, if anyone tells you the concerns about HFCS are baseless, they're probably working for the corn lobby.
Umm...first, I don't work at all, and when I did it had nothing to do with government or agriculture. As for hfcs being bad for you because it's easier to digest, there's another group of creatures on this planet that learned that quite a few millions of years ago: bees, particularly honey bees. Honey and hfcs have a identical chemical composition. The only thing to distinguish between the two substances is the pollen and other trace things in honey. In fact, the lower amount of those trace things is the only way to tell if a shady honey seller has tried to increase profits by adding hfcs to their honey. Now I can't imagine you are going to try to argue honey is bad for us. Yet is honey isn't bad for us as a sweetener, then logically neither is hfcs. As for hfcs being more processed than table sugar, even if I agree that is somehow true, it is also true that hfcs is no more heavily processed than honey. To me it's just unfortunate bees and/or honey sellers don't have at least as effective a lobbying group as the corn market has. Then it would be an argument of table sugar vs honey and I would love to see how the current anti-hfcs crowd would instead handle being the anti-honey crowd instead.
@@wtrdawnlord I don't know where you get your info but I am guessing you are well over 300 pounds. If you overdue it on honey, you will have similar health issues as if you overdid it on HFCS, that is true. But tell me, how many grams of honey are in a can of coke? How many grams of honey are in store-bought baked goods? How many grams of honey are in cheap brands of ice cream? How many grams of honey are in sweetened yogurt? How many grams of honey are in bread, canned fruit and frozen food? The answer is usually around 0. But these are all foods consumed in large amounts by people in the US, and they are sweetened with hfcs. BTW, honey also contains enzymes, minerals, vitamins, and amino acids that give honey antibacterial, anti-fungal, and antioxidant properties. Lastly, when you consume a can of coke with hfcs, it is an immediate blast to your liver, your body has no time to metabolize it. Rarely, do people eat straight honey. Honey consumed with fiber or used as an ingredient slows the metabolizing process, which spares your liver from the onslaught and doesn't send it into overdrive, which causes it to produce higher levels of insulin.
Sugar and HFCS should not be eaten. HFCS is slightly worse because it contains a little more fructose than table sugar. Your body runs on glucose, it's basically pure energy. However your body can do nothing with fructose, but the liver can convert it to fat, which can then be converted to glucose. So if you are eating table sugar, half of it becomes fat.. not good. Your brain does not recognize fructose as food, so calories from fructose do not make you feel full, leading to over eating.
Instead of binging on these in one night (despite how much I want to), I'm watching a different SciShow video every day. Should be occupied until sometime mid next year! And I get to keep sharp and learn things in the process :D
Along these same lines, you could talk about the glycemic index and what a high or low glycemic index means for that particular food item (mentioning how our bodies process these foods).
I've done my best to cut out HFCS and if I eat something with a decent amount of HFCS now, it is usually followed by a splitting headache. It really sucks because this shit is in just about everything.
On second thought, rather than repeat what other people have already said, I will suggest a book. Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a deliberate and methodical look at where our food comes from and what goes into getting it to the table. I found most startling the section on the "industrial" meal, where he laments that, no matter where he starts on his backtrack from finished product to raw material, he ends up in a cornfield in Iowa.
Sick Revolting Piss yeah ive tried to explain to friends that fat is needed for the absorption of some nutrients and vitamins and they look at me like in crazy. But these are the same people who think a multivitamin in the morning keeps them healthy and that every thing in it gets asorbed and is in a form they can use
If the oil runs out, you can mix high-fructose corn syrup [called glucose-fructose syrup or isoglucose in the UK] with ammonium nitrate to make a possible ANFO substitute.
I came here with 1 question. That question was simply "Is high-fructose corn syrup good or bad for you" and what I got was a lot closer to " Uhhhhhhh.... IDK."
by itself? no, but if you look at your groceries you'll notice that it's been added to EVERYTHING, adding extra sugar to everything is probably the reason Americans are way fatter now
As I understand it, HFCS has a fructose:glucose ratio of roughly 55:45, which is close to the ratio of 50:50 for sucrose. Both cane sugar and HFCS have plenty of glucose in them and will give you a sharp blood sugar spike. Fructose has to be metabolized by the liver before it can be used by the body, so it has a delayed effect on blood sugar levels. However, simple sugars do not add to satiety. Satiety comes from eating nutrients (protein, fiber, complex carbs) that release leptin hormone.
i just dont like it coz for example in soda it tastes too sweet. also i like to have choices. i dont like how everything has it. what if i just want regular sugar because i feel like it. in my opinion, regular sugar tastes better. its not a matter of it being related to obesity or that it is poisonous because it comes from genetically modified corn. i just like regular sugar. geesh....... give me back my choices!
The only reason why HFCS is fattening, is because of the presence of fructose. Fructose actually digests a lot like alcohol, giving you not that much energy because it doesn't go through the whole Citric Acid Cycle and then it stores as fat, like alcohol. So pretty much, drinking a lot of fructose = drinking a lot of alcohol without the buzz and more than likely lacking the oxidants. That is why those who drink a lot of soda/fruit juice, eat candy, etc. Have fat deposits that are similar to alcoholics, although not entirely. (Which is also the reason you should be staying away from Agave Nectar because that is around 50-90% fructose... which is a good reason why its sweeter and because fructose doesn't have a high glucose index, its looked at favorably for diabetes... yet makes you increasingly more fat because of what I explained prior... so in long run is a lot worse for you. So Agave Nectar is probably worse for you than HFCS) Cheers!
Well, this was about the most uninformative episode of SciShow I've seen since I subscribed. It took Hank effectively 4 minutes to say "I don't know anything about this topic".
Adult hyaline articular cartilage is progressively mineralised at the junction between cartilage and bone. It is then termed articular calcified cartilage. A mineralisation front advances through the base of the hyaline articular cartilage at a rate dependent on cartilage load and shear stress. Intermittent variations in the rate of advance and mineral deposition density of the mineralising front lead to multiple tidemarks in the articular calcified cartilage.
There was something in one of the science rags in the 90s that suggested that high-levels of Fructose in foods was linked to an increase in diabetes. Something about the way it is handled by the liver, requiring more work. It explicitly mentioned HFCS too.
I would like to make a point that corn syrup (especially HFCS) is actually kind of scary in that the corn it originates from is inedible in its raw form and it requires many chemicals, some of them dangerous, to actually turn it into an edible form. I would also like to point out that HFCS is very different from sugar in the way our bodies process it. I am not sure of the exact process, but my mother and I both will get sick with symptoms similar to a severe lactose intolerance whenever we eat foods containing corn syrup or HFCS. it's not definitive proof, but it's something to think about.
hank , you're very funny in a weird quirky way, you kind of remind me of michael cera! i dont get it how people can call you a geek or a nerd, you're really cool! i wish there was more people interested in science and i think you're videos are key to getting people fascinated with these subjects.
you also never got to your point with any "real" evidence. You just said "this video failed"... you might wanna say a fact..or site a source that supports your pointless comment. Because me typing "nuh uh 57Mickey, you're wrong about everything you just said", is pointless, it offers to "reason" as to why you're wrong..... get it?
Why does the title says "Dark Lord" as if darkness is scary, bad, or unnatural. It's kind of odd how some people feel about darkness. When talking about certain things, some people equate the dark to being scary, bad, or evil, but I never could understand it. =/ This is just a philosophical thought, but if darkness has been around ever since the beginning of everything before anything else, is all around us, and there is even inside of us (I imagine it gets pretty dark inside of our bodies. I don't think we have light bulbs inside of us), isn't darkness one of the most natural and non-evil things out there? =o Okay, you could say that high-fructose corn syrup is bad or whatever, but don't call it a "Dark Lord." That doesn't even make any sense. l=D
Alex Wilkinson Yeah, some people do view it like that. I just never really could understand it. There's nothing dangerous about the darkness itself. Yeah, there are predators and stuff at night that people might not be able to see as well that could be waiting to get them, but there are also predators and dangers in the day that people should be just as afraid of or try to avoid. But even still, cornstarch didn't even seem that bad or different from regular sugar. Not all that dangerous. l=D People may get a little chubbier from ingesting too much though. XD
Yay Me Becaue humans are day animals we hunt,create,gather,farm and play during the day.because humans have no natural night or dark sight and big scary demon cats and vampires do have night sight. Basically its the things that use the tool that we are scared of, but separated the danger is drastically decreased like say a psycho path with a gun, a gun without a wielder is just a very l shaped piece of metal, a psychopath by himself is dangerous but not nearly as much when we give him the gun
It may be that Fanta in Spain and Fanta in America have different formulations. Just the fact that sugar is included makes a big difference in how it's produced: table sugar needs to be dissolved into a solution, which often involves heating that solution, while HFCS is a liquid and can just be poured into water and mixed a bit.
About the glucose tasting sweeter than HFCS: As I understand it, when we taste "sweet", we basically detect the number of molecules of sugars. when you split a complex sugar, eg lactose, into glucose and galactose, by using an enzyme (what your body does after you drink it), and drink that, it will taste sweeter, because there are now twice the sugar molecules in the drink. On that note, I would like to request a video on food allergies, either here or in biology crash course.
Light is the absence of darkness. Light bulbs actually suck the darkness from a room until they burn out leaving the dark residue inside. Cut open a spent flashlight battery and find it has absorbed all the dark it can n hold.
It would be interesting to look at the correlation between the average size of beverages offered at restaurants and obesity over the last 30 years. There was a time when a "small" soft drink meant 8 or 10 ounces and a "large" drink was 16 ounces. Compare that with the sizes offered today at McKing-in-a-box.
Darn! You mentioned the $40 billion taxes we pay to lower the cost of high fructose corn syrup. Why didn't you mention the proposed bills that will tax products with high fructose corn syrup more than others? One of those things that only a government can invent: tax it to make it cheaper then tax it to make it more expensive.
You should put little annotations to the videos you mention doing in the middle of the video at the end, too... that way I don't distract myself on an endless chain of your wonderfully informative videos in the middle of the one I'm already watching I'm easily distracted and lazy and it would be soopa nice :~) **PEAS AND LUV**
byakuugan914 The nazis. Actually I think Google funded the first couple years of SciShow and Crashcourse. Then the funding started to run out and the Green brothers started Subbable (which has now merged with Patreon) to fund it. They also make money from various other jobs that they do (Hank has about a thousand different jobs and John is a highly successful novelist).
The guy talking needs to be paid, the cameras and lighting need to be bought, the people who researched the info need to be paid, the person who wrote the script needs to be paid, the person who edited the video needs to be paid, the person/people who filmed the guy talking needs to be paid, the internet connection to upload this video has to be paid for, the space where it's filmed has to be paid for (though some of those may be the same people)... I think they were talking about how food companies have the tendency to pay for research that shows their own products in a favorable light. So if this video were funded by one of these companies, its arguments are probably invalid.
Also, HFCS isn't metabolized the same way as regular sugar. HFCS goes directly into the bloodstream which causes massive spikes in blood sugar whereas sugar passes through the digestive tract, broken down, then released into the bloodstream.
Related to HFCS: Omega-6 vs Omega-3 dietary balance My father had a heart attack a few years ago, and didn't like the meds they had him on...especially the rat poison...so he researched and began his own diet in an effort to remove the need to take those meds (based on blood tests and with doctor approval) He's now down to just two
It's probably more readily available there than HFCS as (correct me if I'm wrong) there are not millions of acres of cornfields across Europe, as there are in America.
The point is that there is no relation between the fact that you're not allowed to enter a plant and the danger related to the product the plant is producing. You also can't just walk in the installations where they filter the tap water.
Also, there's pretty much nothing left of the corn in the corn syrup used for HFCS. It's really just pure glucose, which has the same molecular structure no matter what plant you extract it form.
Pretty funny and informative video. I'm here because I was drinking a Vanilla Coke and was just staring at my UA-cam feed. You have pretty good idea of what happened next.
The thing is that many people are scared of ingredients with chemistry names. HFCS is sinister sounding compared to sugar (even though white cane sugar is bleached). Years ago, some college kids created an awareness group about DHMO, or Dihydrogen Monoxide. Otherwise, known as 'water'. A lot of people fell for it.
Ive tried both versions of coke and the sugar one taste less diet-y taste. Thankfully in Australia they all have sugar as does nearly everything sweetened.
IIRC one of the key problems is that it tastes sweeter, and the manufacturers use so much of it, generally increasing the carbohydrate levels in just about anything, while tricking our brains into wanting to eat more of it. Chemically there is little difference.
I really appreciate that Hank is providing us with different information and not forcing one side of the argument or the other on us, because it really is an ambiguous issue, and we should realize that there isn't just one answer. Thanks Hank :)
One interesting thing about high fructose corn syrup vs. sugar that wasn't mentioned: as I understand it you can suspend more of the former in a solution than the latter, making it possible to make things way sweeter by containing way for high fructose corn syrup than is possible with sugar.
There's a variety of research on this, depends on if you like looking at medical articles. But essentially Fructose does not stimulate secretion of insulin (at least as well as glucose). Research seems to imply that Insulin release by itself can affect satiety, or in combination stimulates leptin release which also triggers the "full" response. Key takeaway is that sugar in general is the enemy, but there is a such concept as bad ("table sugar") and (HFCS) worse.
In my opinion the increase in obesity in America has a lot to do with our love of sweets. Yes, HFCS has made it much cheaper and easier to sweeten every processed item we buy; but it is our desire for sweets that drives us to over consume calorie laden foods. If you watch vids of people from other countries trying American treats you notice that they usually comment on how very sweet the food tastes.
here in europe (germany in my case) HFCS isn't used in anything.. its all regular sugar usually made from sugar beet which here is subsidized pretty high.
From my limited knowledge, I believe that high fructose corn syrup is considered dangerous largely because your intestine is really bad at handling unbound fructose, allowing it to pass through the intestinal walls and sort of float around until it ends up settling down in a place where it may cause inflammation, like muscle joints and brain tissue. Theoretically, of course.
HFCS has about double the glycemic index as evaporated cane juice (brownish sugar). Basically, if you're prone to sugar crashes - like after drinking soda, then HFCS will do it too. (The sugar spikes faster and higher in the blood). That's why I don't like it, and I don't like white sugar either - they're both pretty high on the glycemic index table. Google search for 'glycemic index sugar' to learn more :)
Fun fact, HFCS, has pretty much the same calories/gram as table sugar. And HFCS sweetness levels can be controlled by adjusting the ratio of fructose to glucose. That's why its called HIGH FRUCTOSE corn syrup.
I will take them, please message me for an address. BTW Love the show, I was a BioChem major before I ran our of money and joined the military. Your shows bring back fond memories of happier times in college and I encourage you to continue them. -Carnie
some sodas, especially diet ones, contain a chemical known as aspartame. aspartame, taken in high doses, has been shown to cause various forms of cancer and brain tumors. However, the amount you receive from soda is so little that it would take a massive amount per day to affect you in such a fashion.
I saw a new study saying, 'Ingesting HFCS causes cartilage in joints to accept less calcium, causing joint pain in the long run, especially in the knees.'
I can't tell you a complete answer but I can tell you that in veterinary context it's a food additive that is used to increase absorption. Seems more true when it comes to fatty contents though everything is absorbed more when using aspartame. IIRC it works by slowing down peristalsis. Regardless, you may want to stick to regular and not "diet" when aspartame is involved, especially alongside meals...
If sugar is so bad for us then why do we need it to live? People often ask the question, "If such and such is so bad for us, then why do they taste so good?" The answer to this is simple in most cases; the reason why our brain find them so good is because they are absolutely essential to our survival, so those who found them tasty would seek them out more. However, this evolutionary adaptation occurred back in the days when these things were very hard to come by but now that humans have conquered the world, many of us now have almost unlimited access to these things. As told saying goes, too much of a good thing can kill you. The same thing applies to meat.
+Bob Jones We don't need sugar, specifically. to survive. Or more precisely, we don't need to take in sugar through our food intake. Sugar basically serves as "empty calories" when we eat it, providing energy but being otherwise unnecessary. That's what I heard, anyway. I'm not _entirely_ sure it's true, but apparently our bodies can synthesize sugar from fat and vice versa, though there are some types of fat that we do need to take in through food because they're essential and we can't synthesize them.
Eating loads of sugar was fine 10000 years ago; in fact, it was great, but we had much more active lives then, wouldn't have eaten anywhere near as much sugar (or food in general) then, and died at like 30, which is way before the problems of sugar intake would have come into play. Not many people 10s of thousands of years ago would have died of obesity or cancer or stroke or heart disease or anything; they would have died from infection most likely. .
David - Well, yeah, taking a saber-tooth bite to the head is not considered a healthy lifestyle choice. Re: the dietary stuff, obesity can happen at any age, but long-term effects like cancer, clogged arteries and heart disease take longer.
hfcs is metabolized differently and it does not send the satiated response to the brain when consumed, like regular sugar. This means that you consume much more of it without feeling full = more calories consumed.
Do a segment on low carb diet fads and the science behind why people think it works and why some people think its dangerous - there is so much debate about whether or not its good or bad for you. Some health administrations swear that its bad for your heart etc etc, while others say that it is completely sustainable and even healthy. It is a popular subject and I think people would love to hear and learn about the biological science behind it that so many disagree on, from a reliable source.
There is a good lecture by Dr. Robert H. Lustig called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" that goes in-depth into high-fructose corn syrup, explaining how fructose, sucrose, glucose get broken down in our digestion and what other effects they cause. It is also an entertaining and captivating lecture, where he does lay down the ails hfcs caused to society. The full lecture can be found on UA-cam
In one of his later video. he references a study that say, that HFCS, doesn't register in the brain at the same as sucrose, that the brain registers HFCS as less calories as sucrose, when in reality tests were of equal actual calorie amounts, suggesting that the brain tells you to eat more calories.
About 5 years ago, I've heard that the way HFCS is manufactured contained a worrying amount of mercury. I never really thought that HFCS itself was bad, but that it nevertheless still brought bad news
Nice video! It'd be cool if you went into the science of how HFCS (and sugar) is extremely detrimental to our health (beyond obesity). I mean, you have a substantial amount of influence on many young minds, and I feel like you ended this video on a complacent note, as opposed to providing some clarity and direction for making conscious choices with our diets. Food is meant to be used as fuel to nourish & energize our bodies... Most of what we eat now (including HFCS) is the antithesis of fuel.
I think ordinary crystalline sugar just needs to be kept dry, rather than needing protection from humidity. I think it's fine in sacks or hoppers. Sugar beet actually has more sugar per pound than sugar cane and the US is the world's second-biggest producer; the UK gets most of its sugar from beet. I suspect you're right about subsidy being the cause.
The problem is once again over consumption. There very well can be a correlation between HFCS and obesity but this is hard to prove with the overwhelming amount of sugars in our diet. As one has pointed out, how can it be in items that are not sweet such as bread and tomato soup? It has become so common to add these as preservatives. It is sad that I must pay more for healthier items. Americans are obese because we can not afford to eat to be healthy.
Sometimes I hear people asking about a sweetener that is higher in glucose or 100% glucose because fructose is often portrayed as the worse of the 2 monosaccharides in simple table sugar or HFCS55 (common high fructose corn syrup). While I'm not an expert, just to answer that question for those looking, corn syrup is 100% glucose. Not to be mistaken with HIGH FRUCTOSE corn syrup. Even then, some 'corn syrup' may actually contain HFCS and so may not be 100% glucose. Further, 100% glucose corn syrup won't taste as sweet as HFCS so you might be disappointed if you are looking for a sugar alternative. The best sugar alternative I am aware of is moderation or to consume whole (unjuiced) fruits like oranges, peaches, apples, bananas, and plums. Make sure to eat the pulp/rinds for the fiber which will help digest the sugars in a healthy way.
I think you may have missed an important point -- the difference in the way the body metabolizes sucrose and fructose. Fructose can be metabolized only by the liver and over-consumption of fructose can result in a fatty liver. Not good.
You should do a SciShow episode on HOW the body metabolizes sugar vs high fructose corn syrup. The chemical reactions involved, and how it is stored. I think that would be more conclusive to your argument.
there is no difference in a vacuum, however, if you look at some specific sources like fruit, they contain things like fiber that change how your body metabolizes sugars
@@corvusclones Yes there is, your body needs to convert the fructose into glucose to be absorbed by the cells, the conversion requires enzymes and more byproducts, fructose also doesn't spike your insulin as much as glucose, hence creates more complications in your blood stream, that was just on top of my head, if you have some time, google for more info, happy new year!
@@moussaaili2492 please dont lie/makes things up, fructose is processed in your liver. It is almost exclusively processed in the liver. It typically is used for forming glycogen or trygliceride synthesis instead of short term energy, it doesn't do much of anything to your blood stream. While this is a complicated issue, you are right that it's pretty easy to verify with google. Why make something up and end it with a call for people to look up what you didn't?
@@corvusclones Al ot of studies showed that fructose after getting into liver through your BLOOD STREAM, causes many issues because the liver requires to convert it to glucose( glycogen if you wanna go more Biology terms) so it can be used by mitochondrial, in small amounts it doesn't harm since it's converted through fructogenesis like you mentioned to triglycerides and glucose, however, studies showed that combining it with glucose, the intestines absorb more of it that pure fructose, I am not sure where you get your facts, but mine are from universities' journals, and I didn't call you a liar so please be curtious if it's not too hard, happy new year.
@@moussaaili2492 I'm not sure what you mean by "going through the bloodstream" given that glycogen, which I'm not sure you understand because while it is composed of exclusively glucose molecules, it's pretty much the same with plant walls, chitin, and starch. In the case of glycogen, it uses 1,4 alpha glycosidic linkages to store fuel in a way that it can be easily broken down(not like the beta bonds in cell walls and chitin), in fact, even though you seem like you think glucose is dangerous, glycogen is the main long term storage for energy in your body and I'm not sure a human could live without a pretty large amount of it. They certainly wouldn't be healthy or able to exercise/do much that required exertion. You asked me not to accuse you of lying, but you keep using the term "blood stream" and emphasising it. It's very clear that you are referring to the circulatory system, but the pathway from the stomach to liver, while it carries blood, is it's own portal veneos pathway. Though it is possible that you aren't being dishonest, it's possible that you just keep commenting without understanding what you are saying, in which case I emplore you to stop. Don't spread misinformation, if you care about a topic, study it more carefully, learn how it really works rather than just what aspects of it you can twist to fit the narrative of your preconcieved notions
High fructose corn syrup isn't "wonderfully cheap," and it isn't JUST because of the subsidies that it's used. It's also because sugar producers demanded an import tariff that made sugar too expensive. Soft drink makers, among others, switched to corn syrup to save money and ended up making the corn farmers dependent on the import tariff on sugar as well. Of course not every manufacturer that used corn syrup as a raw material could switch, especially candy makers so their costs soared. Eventually some major ones ended up moving their factories to other countries to save money on sugar (labor is generally cheaper too but not, by itself, enough to make them leave). A big example of this is Brachs which left Illinois and took hundreds of jobs with it.
Whatever its health effects, the economics of high fructose corn syrup is a mess.
Also, technically I think there actually is a tiny amount of hfcs in that corn dog, though it probably rounds down to 0 grams.
Well said big cheese
That was a lot less informative than I expected.
What were you expecting?
Well this was the first Scishow video that disappointed me because it really didn't say anything.
I grew up in the 80s & 90s, when Fat Free was the fad, too. My parents were constantly on a diet & I became afraid of fat & developed an eating disorder in my teens.
My grandmother focused on eating healthy natural foods & leading an active lifestyle. Her Dad was a milkman & used to pour cream on his cereal & was never overweight & always had beautiful skin. She said fat is a natural part of the human diet & our bodies need it. (Go, Grandma!) She’d say, “[Look at the old farmers, Stacie. They ate bacon for breakfast, poured cream on their cereal, lived off the land…and we’re never overweight. It’s not the fat that’s bad, Stacie, it’s lifestyle changes. People lead more secondary lifestyles. It’s what people are eating & how much they’re eating & then having jobs where they sit at a desk all day. People aren’t moving like they used to…]” She was right!
It wasn’t until recent years that I learned that a person can be overweight AND malnourished. Eating cheap heavily processed foods with little to no nutritive value messes with every system of the body & can cause all kinds of health problems, leaving a person to feel full but never satisfied.
We live in a world of abundance. I got tired of tracking calories & keeping up with the latest diet fads. I got a science degree, learned how my body works & buy basic minimally processed ingredients, grow what I can& teach my kids to make everything from scratch- right down to bread & pasta. Sure, we buy candy bars & chips sometimes but keep them out of the house for the most part. I get a little pudgy in the winter but burn it off growing food inthe summer.
I tell my kids, people evolved eating natural foods. If it doesn’t grow on a tree or in the dirt or you can’t catch it or kill it, you might want to reconsider eating it…or at least not eat it in abundance. Put the basic stuff in your body that you need to live & keep moving. You’ll feel like a million bucks, even when you start getting achey as you get older. It’s just sad because nutritious foods are expensive these days & people can’t afford to feed their families well. And people have lost touch with whatI remand to leads self sufficient lifestyle within just a few generations. I make my kids listen to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books on audible to help them realize that humans had hands inthe dirt until recent generations in the western world. Of course, they still want their screens more than anything. But hopefully one day when they’re older & wiser (God willing)they’ll look back & realize that Mom wasn’t such a but after all.
We are what we eat. There’s an old saying that never went out of style. 😆
And I don’t know how to make fat free cookies either. Ridiculous!
Obesity is very cheap these days.
I remember a dude from Australia that I used to work with pointed out how cheap food is here. I think he said a $6 steak in the US would cost like $15 in Australia. I think he moved here in the late 90s, so it might be different now. Either way, you can get like 5,000 calories at McDonald's for about $10, which is maybe 20 minutes of work for the average American.
@@Aeturnalis Tell that to the millions of Americans who are still making $7.25 an hour if they have a job at all. Maybe if you average out the incomes including the very rich you could get those numbers. But I can guarantee that few of the people who I know are making $30 an hour.
@Oscar Ortiz Anyone who thinks that most Americans make $30 an hour clearly has no understanding of the class and social status of the majority here.
@Oscar Ortiz No I agree that class and social status determine what most people eat. It really is about how we are raised. But it bothers me when people try to say that most Americans are rich. There are already too many people around the world who think that the streets here are lined in gold. We don't need to be putting out any more false information about americans being insanely rich. The reality is that most are not.
Love your foody science videos! keep them coming I took a course in Food Science in college and I learned how companies make cookies fat free. The fats in cookies were replaced with carbohydrate gels and gums (such as carageen gum - which is made from seaweed) Gels have a semblance of the mouth feel of fat but the lower calorie content of 4kcals/g instead of 9 kcal/g, also making them conveniently lower in calories but much less tasty.
You said that the two types of sugar are chemically similar because they have the same components...one with them bonded together and the other not. It seems like that should make a HUGE difference. I mean, you don't take a mix of hydrogen and oxygen gasses and say that it's basically water. Right? Or, if you really want to stick with sugars, lactose is just a disaccharide composed of galactose and glucose. Neither galactose nor glucose causes any problems in someone with a lactose intolerance. It seems like the statement that they are similar requires more proof than was given.
Starch breaks down into glucose, too, right? I would say that the biological effect of eating starch is not the same as the biological effect of eating just glucose. I happen to have just finished eating a big bowl of pasta. If I had replaced that with a bowl of sugar with some pasta sauce on it, I would be feeling pretty sick right now. What I'm getting at is that flooding the body with simple sugars appears to be more damaging than giving it sugars which take some time to break down.
Starch doesn't break down 1 to 1 to glucose. Sucrose is directly broke down into glucose and fructose.
I was once told by a very reliable source, "Eat anything you want, as long as it's unhealthy." This source also happened to be my, sister who weighed 82 pounds at 5' 4".
Hey! Do a special on the "zero-calorie" sweeteners while you're at it! (Aspartame, Splenda, Sucralose, Stevia, etc...)
There seems to be SO MANY misconceptions and myths going on about these, and I'd actually like to know more about them because... I'm guilty of consuming them way too often. I just hate sugary soda so it's a good alternative usually.
Could the increase in American obesity have to do with the simplicity of the HFCS on a molecular level, causing even more of an unstable metabolic impact on the body due to the lack of time needed to break the substance down before it entering the bloodstream? That's my best guess.
@Budo Ka and you honestly think it's just the murikans with more food and extra lazy lifestyles? And not to mention communist China successfully dodged the obesity problem cause most of their diet is plain rice. China's literally the rice bowl of the world? Anyways, just keep brainwashing yourself that it's just the lazy lifestyle and has nothing to do with body chemistry. Surely Humans are the laziest species on earth and thats whats driving is fat. Till you realize Humans are literally the least laziest species on Earth and we work more per day than most other species which are not half as diabetic as we are.
Health problems: High-fructose corn syrup contains free-form monosaccharides of fructose and glucose, so it cannot be considered biologically equivalent to conventional sugar which is just sucrose, which has a glycosidic bond that links the fructose and glucose together, and slows its break down in the body.
Even if this metabolic difference were not present, every cell in your body uses glucose for energy, and it's metabolized in every organ of your body. About 20 percent of glucose is metabolized in your liver. Fructose, on the other hand, is entirely metabolized in your liver, because your liver is the only organ that has the transporter for it.
Since all fructose gets shuttled to your liver, it ends up taxing and damaging your liver in the same way alcohol and other toxins do. And just like alcohol, fructose is metabolized directly into fat - not cellular energy, like glucose. So, eating fructose in excess of the very small amount our body can handle is really like eating fat - it just gets stored in your fat cells, which leads to mitochondrial malfunction, obesity and obesity-related diseases.
And speaking of toxins, HFCS is loaded with them, due to the highly-chemical process of manufacturing it. It also increases your triglyceride levels and your LDL (bad) cholesterol. Fructose is relatively harmless in small quantities, but virtually all soda and processed foods are loaded with it so if you want to be healthy try eating real food instead.
I wish he'd gone into the rat study more, because it is true, and a big deal. The rats become obese compared to eating sugar or rat chow. The theory is that it's because of how highly processed HFCS is compared to sugar: your body has to do a lot less work to digest it.
Either way, if anyone tells you the concerns about HFCS are baseless, they're probably working for the corn lobby.
Umm...first, I don't work at all, and when I did it had nothing to do with government or agriculture.
As for hfcs being bad for you because it's easier to digest, there's another group of creatures on this planet that learned that quite a few millions of years ago: bees, particularly honey bees.
Honey and hfcs have a identical chemical composition. The only thing to distinguish between the two substances is the pollen and other trace things in honey. In fact, the lower amount of those trace things is the only way to tell if a shady honey seller has tried to increase profits by adding hfcs to their honey.
Now I can't imagine you are going to try to argue honey is bad for us. Yet is honey isn't bad for us as a sweetener, then logically neither is hfcs.
As for hfcs being more processed than table sugar, even if I agree that is somehow true, it is also true that hfcs is no more heavily processed than honey.
To me it's just unfortunate bees and/or honey sellers don't have at least as effective a lobbying group as the corn market has. Then it would be an argument of table sugar vs honey and I would love to see how the current anti-hfcs crowd would instead handle being the anti-honey crowd instead.
@@wtrdawnlord I don't know where you get your info but I am guessing you are well over 300 pounds. If you overdue it on honey, you will have similar health issues as if you overdid it on HFCS, that is true. But tell me, how many grams of honey are in a can of coke? How many grams of honey are in store-bought baked goods? How many grams of honey are in cheap brands of ice cream? How many grams of honey are in sweetened yogurt? How many grams of honey are in bread, canned fruit and frozen food? The answer is usually around 0. But these are all foods consumed in large amounts by people in the US, and they are sweetened with hfcs. BTW, honey also contains enzymes, minerals, vitamins, and amino acids that give honey antibacterial, anti-fungal, and antioxidant properties. Lastly, when you consume a can of coke with hfcs, it is an immediate blast to your liver, your body has no time to metabolize it. Rarely, do people eat straight honey. Honey consumed with fiber or used as an ingredient slows the metabolizing process, which spares your liver from the onslaught and doesn't send it into overdrive, which causes it to produce higher levels of insulin.
Sugar and HFCS should not be eaten. HFCS is slightly worse because it contains a little more fructose than table sugar. Your body runs on glucose, it's basically pure energy. However your body can do nothing with fructose, but the liver can convert it to fat, which can then be converted to glucose. So if you are eating table sugar, half of it becomes fat.. not good. Your brain does not recognize fructose as food, so calories from fructose do not make you feel full, leading to over eating.
Instead of binging on these in one night (despite how much I want to), I'm watching a different SciShow video every day. Should be occupied until sometime mid next year! And I get to keep sharp and learn things in the process :D
You probably have watched by now what I've watched in 3 days
The problem isnt the sugar, its the lack of nutrients
Along these same lines, you could talk about the glycemic index and what a high or low glycemic index means for that particular food item (mentioning how our bodies process these foods).
The link for the Reference is not working, is that just me?
The link for the references for this episode lead to a page "buy instagram followers"
How do i access the actual references please?
You have adware most likely
Nevermind you're right
They must have fixed the references. They all work for me.
I've done my best to cut out HFCS and if I eat something with a decent amount of HFCS now, it is usually followed by a splitting headache. It really sucks because this shit is in just about everything.
I try to get HFCS in as much of my foods as possible. It has no deleterious effect on me. Apparently one of us is superhuman, and the other is broken.
Craig Gibson Superhuman? Maybe not human at all.
I'll tell you, you can taste the difference between Cocacola made with High-Fructose Corn Syrup and Cocacola made with Sugar.
Agreed!
hfcs soda tastes like soap, like an after taste of something unnatural.
Is it just me, or did he seem really tired and/or depressed at the very end?
The corndog was dragging him down.
I was thinking that too!
His corndog covered in baconaise started catching up with him lol
On second thought, rather than repeat what other people have already said, I will suggest a book. Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" is a deliberate and methodical look at where our food comes from and what goes into getting it to the table. I found most startling the section on the "industrial" meal, where he laments that, no matter where he starts on his backtrack from finished product to raw material, he ends up in a cornfield in Iowa.
Eating fat is essential to having a fit body. Stay away from all processed sugar. Cook your own food in coconut oil to be healthy
Sick Revolting Piss yeah ive tried to explain to friends that fat is needed for the absorption of some nutrients and vitamins and they look at me like in crazy. But these are the same people who think a multivitamin in the morning keeps them healthy and that every thing in it gets asorbed and is in a form they can use
If the oil runs out, you can mix high-fructose corn syrup [called glucose-fructose syrup or isoglucose in the UK] with ammonium nitrate to make a possible ANFO substitute.
I came here with 1 question. That question was simply "Is high-fructose corn syrup good or bad for you" and what I got was a lot closer to " Uhhhhhhh.... IDK."
by itself? no, but if you look at your groceries you'll notice that it's been added to EVERYTHING, adding extra sugar to everything is probably the reason Americans are way fatter now
In short, the research is very clear that a mixture of glucose and fructose (HFCS) is worse than fructose alone, which is worse than glucose alone.
That's because we don't know yet
As I understand it, HFCS has a fructose:glucose ratio of roughly 55:45, which is close to the ratio of 50:50 for sucrose. Both cane sugar and HFCS have plenty of glucose in them and will give you a sharp blood sugar spike. Fructose has to be metabolized by the liver before it can be used by the body, so it has a delayed effect on blood sugar levels. However, simple sugars do not add to satiety. Satiety comes from eating nutrients (protein, fiber, complex carbs) that release leptin hormone.
i just dont like it coz for example in soda it tastes too sweet. also i like to have choices. i dont like how everything has it. what if i just want regular sugar because i feel like it. in my opinion, regular sugar tastes better.
its not a matter of it being related to obesity or that it is poisonous because it comes from genetically modified corn. i just like regular sugar. geesh....... give me back my choices!
The only reason why HFCS is fattening, is because of the presence of fructose. Fructose actually digests a lot like alcohol, giving you not that much energy because it doesn't go through the whole Citric Acid Cycle and then it stores as fat, like alcohol. So pretty much, drinking a lot of fructose = drinking a lot of alcohol without the buzz and more than likely lacking the oxidants. That is why those who drink a lot of soda/fruit juice, eat candy, etc. Have fat deposits that are similar to alcoholics, although not entirely. (Which is also the reason you should be staying away from Agave Nectar because that is around 50-90% fructose... which is a good reason why its sweeter and because fructose doesn't have a high glucose index, its looked at favorably for diabetes... yet makes you increasingly more fat because of what I explained prior... so in long run is a lot worse for you. So Agave Nectar is probably worse for you than HFCS) Cheers!
Well, this was about the most uninformative episode of SciShow I've seen since I subscribed. It took Hank effectively 4 minutes to say "I don't know anything about this topic".
Most episodes are funded by propagandists. This is par for the course with this bought and paid for "information"...
You should do a video on monosodium glutamate. In my opinion, it's even more of a hot topic than high-fructose corn syrup.
"That wasn't good" lol
Adult hyaline articular cartilage is progressively mineralised at the junction between cartilage and bone. It is then termed articular calcified cartilage. A mineralisation front advances through the base of the hyaline articular cartilage at a rate dependent on cartilage load and shear stress. Intermittent variations in the rate of advance and mineral deposition density of the mineralising front lead to multiple tidemarks in the articular calcified cartilage.
I'll take the cookies please!
Smart idea to put other vids you ref in your new vids because it makes me go watch them!
Is this dude from CrashCourse? If not then I'm dumb.
They are brothers. One's a history teacher, this one is a chemist.
Keith Colangelo are they twins?
This is Hank Green, yes, the guy that does CC biology, chemestry, etc. His brother, John Green does the world/American history stuff on crash course.
There was something in one of the science rags in the 90s that suggested that high-levels of Fructose in foods was linked to an increase in diabetes. Something about the way it is handled by the liver, requiring more work. It explicitly mentioned HFCS too.
I would like to make a point that corn syrup (especially HFCS) is actually kind of scary in that the corn it originates from is inedible in its raw form and it requires many chemicals, some of them dangerous, to actually turn it into an edible form. I would also like to point out that HFCS is very different from sugar in the way our bodies process it. I am not sure of the exact process, but my mother and I both will get sick with symptoms similar to a severe lactose intolerance whenever we eat foods containing corn syrup or HFCS. it's not definitive proof, but it's something to think about.
hank , you're very funny in a weird quirky way, you kind of remind me of michael cera!
i dont get it how people can call you a geek or a nerd, you're really cool!
i wish there was more people interested in science and i think you're videos are key to getting people fascinated with these subjects.
you also never got to your point with any "real" evidence. You just said "this video failed"... you might wanna say a fact..or site a source that supports your pointless comment. Because me typing "nuh uh 57Mickey, you're wrong about everything you just said", is pointless, it offers to "reason" as to why you're wrong..... get it?
You fail to address the issue of the human insulin response and how it is affected by a change in the ratio of glucose:fructose in the blood stream...
Why does the title says "Dark Lord" as if darkness is scary, bad, or unnatural. It's kind of odd how some people feel about darkness. When talking about certain things, some people equate the dark to being scary, bad, or evil, but I never could understand it. =/
This is just a philosophical thought, but if darkness has been around ever since the beginning of everything before anything else, is all around us, and there is even inside of us (I imagine it gets pretty dark inside of our bodies. I don't think we have light bulbs inside of us), isn't darkness one of the most natural and non-evil things out there? =o
Okay, you could say that high-fructose corn syrup is bad or whatever, but don't call it a "Dark Lord." That doesn't even make any sense. l=D
Yay Me okay, now you're just trying to be unnecessarily deep.
Michael Panggabean I can't help how far the rabbit hole goes. l=D
Darkness represented danger in the night, and it was scary not being able to see stuff
Alex Wilkinson
Yeah, some people do view it like that. I just never really could understand it. There's nothing dangerous about the darkness itself. Yeah, there are predators and stuff at night that people might not be able to see as well that could be waiting to get them, but there are also predators and dangers in the day that people should be just as afraid of or try to avoid. But even still, cornstarch didn't even seem that bad or different from regular sugar. Not all that dangerous. l=D
People may get a little chubbier from ingesting too much though. XD
Yay Me Becaue humans are day animals we hunt,create,gather,farm and play during the day.because humans have no natural night or dark sight and big scary demon cats and vampires do have night sight. Basically its the things that use the tool that we are scared of, but separated the danger is drastically decreased like say a psycho path with a gun, a gun without a wielder is just a very l shaped piece of metal, a psychopath by himself is dangerous but not nearly as much when we give him the gun
It may be that Fanta in Spain and Fanta in America have different formulations. Just the fact that sugar is included makes a big difference in how it's produced: table sugar needs to be dissolved into a solution, which often involves heating that solution, while HFCS is a liquid and can just be poured into water and mixed a bit.
ill have the cookies
About the glucose tasting sweeter than HFCS: As I understand it, when we taste "sweet", we basically detect the number of molecules of sugars. when you split a complex sugar, eg lactose, into glucose and galactose, by using an enzyme (what your body does after you drink it), and drink that, it will taste sweeter, because there are now twice the sugar molecules in the drink.
On that note, I would like to request a video on food allergies, either here or in biology crash course.
Light is the absence of darkness. Light bulbs actually suck the darkness from a room until they burn out leaving the dark residue inside. Cut open a spent flashlight battery and find it has absorbed all the dark it can n hold.
James walker
Is he high? I think he might be high.
***** He is totally right though.
I guess its a joke, but that's not how it works, that's not how any of this works.
Next you will deny that wind is caused by trees moving around to shake their leaves off.
It would be interesting to look at the correlation between the average size of beverages offered at restaurants and obesity over the last 30 years. There was a time when a "small" soft drink meant 8 or 10 ounces and a "large" drink was 16 ounces. Compare that with the sizes offered today at McKing-in-a-box.
Darn! You mentioned the $40 billion taxes we pay to lower the cost of high fructose corn syrup. Why didn't you mention the proposed bills that will tax products with high fructose corn syrup more than others?
One of those things that only a government can invent: tax it to make it cheaper then tax it to make it more expensive.
Hank I love your videos. You make things so much more interesting and keep on making these videos :)
soooo. dont eat so fucking damn much!!!!!
***** Actually its not, people 30 years ago didn't eat that dam much. And saying its actually harder, just an excuse.
Connor Peake sure eating healthy is easy the hard part is finding the money to do it and finding places to by real food
You should put little annotations to the videos you mention doing in the middle of the video at the end, too... that way I don't distract myself on an endless chain of your wonderfully informative videos in the middle of the one I'm already watching
I'm easily distracted and lazy and it would be soopa nice :~) **PEAS AND LUV**
So I guess the first question is, who funded this video?
byakuugan914 The nazis.
Actually I think Google funded the first couple years of SciShow and Crashcourse. Then the funding started to run out and the Green brothers started Subbable (which has now merged with Patreon) to fund it. They also make money from various other jobs that they do (Hank has about a thousand different jobs and John is a highly successful novelist).
The guy talking needs to be paid, the cameras and lighting need to be bought, the people who researched the info need to be paid, the person who wrote the script needs to be paid, the person who edited the video needs to be paid, the person/people who filmed the guy talking needs to be paid, the internet connection to upload this video has to be paid for, the space where it's filmed has to be paid for (though some of those may be the same people)...
I think they were talking about how food companies have the tendency to pay for research that shows their own products in a favorable light. So if this video were funded by one of these companies, its arguments are probably invalid.
As an add-on to this, perhaps you can do a scishow on sugar substitutes such as Stevia, Nutrasweet, and Splenda, ect.
Great, I appreciate the response! It's something I had been wondering about for awhile but never looked into.
I have sent my entire day watching scishow instead of perparing my finals ... but whatever, I love it :D
This is just so perfect.
Also, HFCS isn't metabolized the same way as regular sugar. HFCS goes directly into the bloodstream which causes massive spikes in blood sugar whereas sugar passes through the digestive tract, broken down, then released into the bloodstream.
Related to HFCS: Omega-6 vs Omega-3 dietary balance
My father had a heart attack a few years ago, and didn't like the meds they had him on...especially the rat poison...so he researched and began his own diet in an effort to remove the need to take those meds (based on blood tests and with doctor approval) He's now down to just two
It's probably more readily available there than HFCS as (correct me if I'm wrong) there are not millions of acres of cornfields across Europe, as there are in America.
The point is that there is no relation between the fact that you're not allowed to enter a plant and the danger related to the product the plant is producing. You also can't just walk in the installations where they filter the tap water.
Also, there's pretty much nothing left of the corn in the corn syrup used for HFCS. It's really just pure glucose, which has the same molecular structure no matter what plant you extract it form.
you forgot the mercury content. And sucrose and HFCS are indeed similar --- similarly bad for you.
Pretty funny and informative video. I'm here because I was drinking a Vanilla Coke and was just staring at my UA-cam feed. You have pretty good idea of what happened next.
The thing is that many people are scared of ingredients with chemistry names. HFCS is sinister sounding compared to sugar (even though white cane sugar is bleached).
Years ago, some college kids created an awareness group about DHMO, or Dihydrogen Monoxide. Otherwise, known as 'water'. A lot of people fell for it.
I actually just had a lecture on this!! Super exciting, because now I can understand the lecture!!
Ive tried both versions of coke and the sugar one taste less diet-y taste. Thankfully in Australia they all have sugar as does nearly everything sweetened.
Fructose, sucrose, glucose, cellulose, lactose, galactose.
Sorry, just wanted to see how many sugars I could name.
IIRC one of the key problems is that it tastes sweeter, and the manufacturers use so much of it, generally increasing the carbohydrate levels in just about anything, while tricking our brains into wanting to eat more of it. Chemically there is little difference.
I really appreciate that Hank is providing us with different information and not forcing one side of the argument or the other on us, because it really is an ambiguous issue, and we should realize that there isn't just one answer. Thanks Hank :)
One interesting thing about high fructose corn syrup vs. sugar that wasn't mentioned: as I understand it you can suspend more of the former in a solution than the latter, making it possible to make things way sweeter by containing way for high fructose corn syrup than is possible with sugar.
There's a variety of research on this, depends on if you like looking at medical articles. But essentially Fructose does not stimulate secretion of insulin (at least as well as glucose). Research seems to imply that Insulin release by itself can affect satiety, or in combination stimulates leptin release which also triggers the "full" response.
Key takeaway is that sugar in general is the enemy, but there is a such concept as bad ("table sugar") and (HFCS) worse.
In my opinion the increase in obesity in America has a lot to do with our love of sweets. Yes, HFCS has made it much cheaper and easier to sweeten every processed item we buy; but it is our desire for sweets that drives us to over consume calorie laden foods. If you watch vids of people from other countries trying American treats you notice that they usually comment on how very sweet the food tastes.
here in europe (germany in my case) HFCS isn't used in anything.. its all regular sugar usually made from sugar beet which here is subsidized pretty high.
From my limited knowledge, I believe that high fructose corn syrup is considered dangerous largely because your intestine is really bad at handling unbound fructose, allowing it to pass through the intestinal walls and sort of float around until it ends up settling down in a place where it may cause inflammation, like muscle joints and brain tissue.
Theoretically, of course.
can also be called "glucose-fructose syrup" and "glucose/fructose" on packaging
HFCS has about double the glycemic index as evaporated cane juice (brownish sugar). Basically, if you're prone to sugar crashes - like after drinking soda, then HFCS will do it too. (The sugar spikes faster and higher in the blood). That's why I don't like it, and I don't like white sugar either - they're both pretty high on the glycemic index table. Google search for 'glycemic index sugar' to learn more :)
Fun fact, HFCS, has pretty much the same calories/gram as table sugar. And HFCS sweetness levels can be controlled by adjusting the ratio of fructose to glucose. That's why its called HIGH FRUCTOSE corn syrup.
i love how it seemes as if hank green is drunk or something. makes him much more enjoyable to watch.
art.
I will take them, please message me for an address. BTW Love the show, I was a BioChem major before I ran our of money and joined the military. Your shows bring back fond memories of happier times in college and I encourage you to continue them.
-Carnie
some sodas, especially diet ones, contain a chemical known as aspartame. aspartame, taken in high doses, has been shown to cause various forms of cancer and brain tumors. However, the amount you receive from soda is so little that it would take a massive amount per day to affect you in such a fashion.
I saw a new study saying, 'Ingesting HFCS causes cartilage in joints to accept less calcium, causing joint pain in the long run, especially in the knees.'
I can't tell you a complete answer but I can tell you that in veterinary context it's a food additive that is used to increase absorption. Seems more true when it comes to fatty contents though everything is absorbed more when using aspartame. IIRC it works by slowing down peristalsis. Regardless, you may want to stick to regular and not "diet" when aspartame is involved, especially alongside meals...
If sugar is so bad for us then why do we need it to live? People often ask the question, "If such and such is so bad for us, then why do they taste so good?" The answer to this is simple in most cases; the reason why our brain find them so good is because they are absolutely essential to our survival, so those who found them tasty would seek them out more. However, this evolutionary adaptation occurred back in the days when these things were very hard to come by but now that humans have conquered the world, many of us now have almost unlimited access to these things. As told saying goes, too much of a good thing can kill you. The same thing applies to meat.
It applies to everything.
Sure, nobody died from a vitamin B12 overdose, but it's entirely possible.
+Bob Jones
We don't need sugar, specifically. to survive. Or more precisely, we don't need to take in sugar through our food intake. Sugar basically serves as "empty calories" when we eat it, providing energy but being otherwise unnecessary.
That's what I heard, anyway. I'm not _entirely_ sure it's true, but apparently our bodies can synthesize sugar from fat and vice versa, though there are some types of fat that we do need to take in through food because they're essential and we can't synthesize them.
Bob Jones we can live perfectly fine on a low carb diet, the brain can run off ketone bodies from breaking down fat
Eating loads of sugar was fine 10000 years ago; in fact, it was great, but we had much more active lives then, wouldn't have eaten anywhere near as much sugar (or food in general) then, and died at like 30, which is way before the problems of sugar intake would have come into play. Not many people 10s of thousands of years ago would have died of obesity or cancer or stroke or heart disease or anything; they would have died from infection most likely. .
David - Well, yeah, taking a saber-tooth bite to the head is not considered a healthy lifestyle choice.
Re: the dietary stuff, obesity can happen at any age, but long-term effects like cancer, clogged arteries and heart disease take longer.
hfcs is metabolized differently and it does not send the satiated response to the brain when consumed, like regular sugar. This means that you consume much more of it without feeling full = more calories consumed.
As someone allergic to corn and corn-derived sweeteners, I for one am very glad I can now find sweet things that won't immediately kill me
Lol I just got a "what is a high fructose corn syrup" commercial before this video
This video is all that is right in the world, subscribed.
SUCH A GOOD SHOW
Do a segment on low carb diet fads and the science behind why people think it works and why some people think its dangerous - there is so much debate about whether or not its good or bad for you. Some health administrations swear that its bad for your heart etc etc, while others say that it is completely sustainable and even healthy. It is a popular subject and I think people would love to hear and learn about the biological science behind it that so many disagree on, from a reliable source.
"Correlation, not a causation" -- I have a nerdgasm every time somebody says that.
thats a cia term used to discredit the cause. youre a sheep.
There is a good lecture by Dr. Robert H. Lustig called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" that goes in-depth into high-fructose corn syrup, explaining how fructose, sucrose, glucose get broken down in our digestion and what other effects they cause. It is also an entertaining and captivating lecture, where he does lay down the ails hfcs caused to society. The full lecture can be found on UA-cam
In one of his later video. he references a study that say, that HFCS, doesn't register in the brain at the same as sucrose, that the brain registers HFCS as less calories as sucrose, when in reality tests were of equal actual calorie amounts, suggesting that the brain tells you to eat more calories.
you should go into how HFCS is digested in the stomach/liver, as compaired to pure cane sugar
About 5 years ago, I've heard that the way HFCS is manufactured contained a worrying amount of mercury. I never really thought that HFCS itself was bad, but that it nevertheless still brought bad news
Part of the problem with HFCS is that it turns off or slows down your "I'm full" feeling.
Nice video!
It'd be cool if you went into the science of how HFCS (and sugar) is extremely detrimental to our health (beyond obesity). I mean, you have a substantial amount of influence on many young minds, and I feel like you ended this video on a complacent note, as opposed to providing some clarity and direction for making conscious choices with our diets.
Food is meant to be used as fuel to nourish & energize our bodies... Most of what we eat now (including HFCS) is the antithesis of fuel.
I think ordinary crystalline sugar just needs to be kept dry, rather than needing protection from humidity. I think it's fine in sacks or hoppers. Sugar beet actually has more sugar per pound than sugar cane and the US is the world's second-biggest producer; the UK gets most of its sugar from beet. I suspect you're right about subsidy being the cause.
This and the caffine (srry bout the spelling) episodes are my favorite sci-show episodes
Btw i will take the cookies
Can't stop watching scishow video's!!! waaah!
The problem is once again over consumption. There very well can be a correlation between HFCS and obesity but this is hard to prove with the overwhelming amount of sugars in our diet. As one has pointed out, how can it be in items that are not sweet such as bread and tomato soup? It has become so common to add these as preservatives. It is sad that I must pay more for healthier items. Americans are obese because we can not afford to eat to be healthy.
Sometimes I hear people asking about a sweetener that is higher in glucose or 100% glucose because fructose is often portrayed as the worse of the 2 monosaccharides in simple table sugar or HFCS55 (common high fructose corn syrup).
While I'm not an expert, just to answer that question for those looking, corn syrup is 100% glucose. Not to be mistaken with HIGH FRUCTOSE corn syrup. Even then, some 'corn syrup' may actually contain HFCS and so may not be 100% glucose. Further, 100% glucose corn syrup won't taste as sweet as HFCS so you might be disappointed if you are looking for a sugar alternative.
The best sugar alternative I am aware of is moderation or to consume whole (unjuiced) fruits like oranges, peaches, apples, bananas, and plums. Make sure to eat the pulp/rinds for the fiber which will help digest the sugars in a healthy way.
I think you may have missed an important point -- the difference in the way the body metabolizes sucrose and fructose. Fructose can be metabolized only by the liver and over-consumption of fructose can result in a fatty liver. Not good.