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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

The corn syrup thing is a US-only thing, isn't it?

The rest of the world seems to use sugar from beets/sugar cane/coconuts?

Correct me if I'm wrong, I base the above statements on a rant by an American coworker about how the corn lobby managed to somehow force American food producers to exclusively use relatively high calory corn syrup as a sweetener as opposed to much lower calory sweeteners.

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The short version is it's because of steep subsidies on corn as a crop. We have tons of the shit, and artificially cheap at that. It goes into foods as itself, foods as corn syrup, corn flour, and a substantial amount is converted to ethanol for fuel.

Corn syrup is kind of a bogeyman in some circles because it contains a slightly higher fraction of fructose than sugar produced from beets or sugar cane. There might be a little something to that as fructose is metabolized through a different pathway than glucose and there is some correlation at the country level between consumption and diabetes rates. But with sugar it's really more the quantity that matters rather than the composition.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2012.736257

It actually contains less fructose than cane sugar, it just has more fructose than normal corn

Were you attempting to post a different link? That study points a pretty strong negative correlation with corn syrup.

  ...Diabetes prevalence was 20% higher in countries with higher availability of HFCS compared to countries with low availability, and these differences were retained or strengthened after adjusting for country-level estimates of body mass index (BMI), population and gross domestic product (adjusted diabetes prevalence=8.0 vs. 6.7%, p=0.03; fasting plasma glucose=5.34 vs. 5.22 mmol/L, p=0.03) despite similarities in obesity and total sugar and calorie availability. These results suggest that countries with higher availability of HFCS have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes independent of obesity.

Being someone who moved to Australia, I'm so glad HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) is almost nowhere to be found here.

>The corn syrup thing is a US-only thing, isn't it?

No, corn syrup is used in food and drinks all over the world.

Personally, I have nothing against corn syrup so long as the sweetness actually tastes nice and appropriate for what I'm consuming.

Corn syrup is also a lot better than artificial sweeteners which all taste like hot garbage and make me literally ill.

The United States accounts for approximately 55 percent of the global consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/495946/consumption-share...

So what about the remaining 45%?

What's the consumption rate for RoW - per capita - compared to the US?

Does it matter? So long as that (or any non-US) number is larger than zero the argument that "corn syrup is US-only" is patently false.

What I meant was "putting corn syrup in most food as the preferred sweetener" is a US-only thing, not "only the US uses corn syrup".

Mexico. Ok, just joking, they like real coke without HFCS

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