Cane Sugar Versus High Fructose Corn Syrup in Soda

Basically raw cane sugar is less expensive to use in Mexico for manufacturing soda. And in the USA, high fructose corn syrup is less expensive to use for manufacturing soda.

Although in the USA, Coca-Cola switched to using high fructose corn syrup in the early 1980s, Mexican coca-cola still uses cane sugar, as do other soft drinks in Mexico, according to the August 4, 2010 Sacramento Bee article, Cane sugar challenges corn syrup in soft-drink formulas.

Cane sugar is used in soft drinks in parts of the world where cane sugar is not expensive. Many countries don't have the machinery to manufacture the type of high fructose corn syrup used in the USA in soda.

Coca-cola products produced locally in various countries, Mexico, for example, use local sweeteners. In the case of Mexico, it's cane sugar. But in the USA, the prices for making and processing high fructose corn syrup are less expensive than if manufacturers bought cane sugar to use in coca cola or any other soft drinks that presently use high fructose corn syrup.

You can research this topic at Milling & Baking News, a publication that covers the grain-based food industries. What you'd find there would be the current prices for high fructose corn syrup, currently at 20 cents per pound. If you wanted to buy raw sugar, the price for raw cane sugar is 33 cents per pound.

The price in the USA for raw cane sugar can go up to 40 cents per pound. If you are a manufacturer of soda, would you try to save money buy using high fructose corn syrup at the less costly price?

If it's about taste, experts would tell you, if you were a manufacturer, that it's not so easy to tell the difference in taste between high fructose corn syrup and raw cane sugar, once it has been bottled, if all you've tasted for the past 20 or more years is the corn syrup in the various brands of soda.

If you're making a health-drink type of soda, you'd emphasize that you use raw cane sugar. There are small soda manufacturers in the USA. Check out River City Root Beer. It's local to Sacramento. See the articles, Cosmo's Root Beer Reviews: River City Root Beer. It's produced by Blue Dog Beverages out of Sacramento, CA. The soda contains carbonated water, cane sugar, caramel color, natural flavor, quillaia extract, phosphoric acid, sodium benzoate, and potassium sorbate, according to the website, River City Rootbeer.

Check out the Blue Dog Beverages website in Sacramento. The local soda manufacturer, Blue Dog has sodas produced the old-fashioned way, according to the company's website. The sodas are "handcrafted from original recipes that were popular in the 1920's, 1930's 1940's and of course the 1950's." These sodas are bottled in glass, the way sodas used to be, and were meant to be. Shop the web site which notes, "Select a memory and enjoy the quality of yesteryear." The following sodas are listed on the company's website:

• Kickapoo Joy Juice - Straight from Dogpatch. Before people decided to "Do the Dew", they did the Kickapoo
• Dad's Root Beer - The classic American Root Beer.
• Leninade - The fall of the iron curtain brings us this fun new flavor
• Grape Nehi - Radar's favorite now available to us civilians
• Moxie - Since 1884, this is history in a bottle.
• Bubble Up - The original "kiss of Lemon, Kiss of Lime."

There's a review of River City Root beer at the Fizzy Gourmet site. Also check out the website, Pops Soda Ranch. They list more than 500 types of colas, root beers, and chocolate milk as well as a wide variety of soft drink beverages. However, Pops Soda Ranch is located in Oklahoma, not Sacramento.

River City Root Beer is produced by Blue Dog Beverages out of Sacramento, CA. Blue Dog is a distributor in Sacramento and the only product they make is River City Root Beer. They also distribute lots of sodas from Real Soda such as Leninade, produced by Real Soda. The soda itself is also colored deep red (in many photos online it appears pink, a traditional color of regular lemonade) and is carbonated. It has approximately 38 grams of cane sugar and about 150 calories per serving.

Leninade is a mildly flavored soda made with real cane sugar; this product is the brainchild of Real Soda, and with the light flavor of citrus and berry flavors, it's anything but 'simple.' See the article on this soda, BevMo! - Leninade Soviet Style Soda 12 oz.

According to the Aug 2, 2010 Reuters (US Edition) article, Cancer cells slurp up fructose, US study finds, fructose is used by the body in a different way than glucose. Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.

If you want to learn more about fructose, check out the posting on the Sacramento Raw Foods Yahoo Group. That message also details the effects of fructose on your body. For example, the posting reports the following pointers.

How Fructose Effects Your Body

1. Fructose also elevates your uric acid levels, which is actually more dangerous than elevated cholesterol levels as it causes chronic, low-level inflammation, which increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, arthritis and premature aging.

2. Fructose also "tricks" your body into gaining weight by fooling your metabolism -- it actually severely impairs your body's normal appetite-control systems.

3. Excessive fructose rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity ("beer belly"), decreased HDL, increased LDL, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar, and high blood pressure -- i.e., classic metabolic syndrome.

4. Fructose metabolism is very similar to alcohol metabolism, which has a multitude of toxic effects, including NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). Metabolically it's very similar to drinking alcohol without the buzz.

The posting makes it clear that excess fructose is the problem, not simply fructose. Fruit contains part sugar and part fructose. According to the website posting, the biological changes made from eating a lot of fructose, that is excess amounts, are not seen when humans or animals eat starch or glucose. What's an excess amount of fructose? The posting puts an excess at more than 25 grams daily of fructose.

You get a lot of fructose hidden in processed foods. It's inexpensive for manufacturers. Also, there may be a problem of lax labeling laws. Another problem is whether fructose in any processed foods are even put on the label.

What happens when you eat excess fructose is that your body may become sensitized to it. How this happens is that the fructose activates metabolic pathways in your body. Now you're in the realm of metabolic and genetic dietetics. The process that happens in your body is that the fructose may activate its own pathways in your body. And those metabolic pathways then become 'unregulated.'

Your body is now more or less out of control as the more fructose you eat, the more effective your body becomes in absorbing fructose, according to the raw foods website posting. The conclusion of that much longer article which details the effects of fructose on your body, is that the more fructose you absorb, the more damage is done to your body's metabolic pathways.

What you feel is that you now may become 'sensitized' to fructose. And if you're feeling any toxic effects from the fructose or adverse reactions to it as you become more and more sensitized, the more sensitized you may become to any toxic effects from the excess fructose.

A small amount of fructose isn't the problem. It's the excess. You get the excess, perhaps, in eating highly concentrated amounts of fructose.

If you are using sweeteners of any kind that are concentrated amounts of fructose, it could be that your body was never made to process this high concentration. Find some other sweetener that doesn't create its' own pathways in your body and sensitize it.

There's a lot less fructose in fresh fruit, and it's balanced with sugar when eaten as a whole fruit, not as a juice with the pulp and fiber removed. Eat the whole fruit, not the sugary water from it--that is the juice without the fiber. Or you could try the plant, stevia in small amounts. See Stevia Information - Questions & Answers about Stevia.

According to a study published November 11, 2009 by the American Society of Nephrology, and the ScienceDaily Nov. 11, 2009 article, "High Fructose Corn Syrup: A Recipe For Hypertension, Study Finds," a diet high in fructose increases the risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension). Source: American Society of Nephrology (ASN)

See the scientific studies, Elliott, Sharon, et al. "Fructose, weight gain, and the insulin resistance syndrome." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 76.5 (2002), or Bantle, John, et al. "Effects of dietary fructose on plasma lipids in healthy subjects." American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 72.5 (2000):1128-1134.

"Agave Nectar is 70-90% fructose and the rest is glucose," according to the August 18, 2008 article, "Is Agave Nectar Good or Bad for Our Health?" Is this is a higher percentage of fructose than in most commercial foods or drinks? Ordinary sucrose (table sugar) is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. Apples contain only 6% fructose whereas Agave is 70-90% fructose. You can search the Mayo Clinic's web site for information regarding whether fructose can or cannot cause potential liver damage and obesity.

See the article, "Sugar and Heart Disease." The article ata the Consumer Health Organization of Canada site notes, "Most fat in our bodies and in the food we eat is in the form of triglycerides (three fatty acid chains attached to a glycerol molecule).

Elevated triglycerides in the blood have been positively linked to proneness to heart disease but these triglycerides do not come directly from dietary fats: they are made in the liver from any excess sugars that have not been completely burned. The source of these excess sugars is any food containing carbohydrates, but particularly refined sugar and processed carbohydrates."

In the blog, "Going Against the Grain," that the article mentioned on the Cheeseslave site, refers viewers to also notes that, "fructose is only one of the sugars in fruit and it occurs in rather small quantities, very unlike the high concentrations of fructose found in any man-made refined sugar."