A University of California study on human subjects seems to indicate what food activists have long believed: high fructose corn syrup has special qualities which cause humans to pork up like animals in a feed lot. Oh, and it also may help cause life-threatening chronic diseases. The study was small, but frightening.

Over 10 weeks, 16 volunteers on a strictly controlled diet, including high levels of fructose, produced new fat cells around their heart, liver and other digestive organs. They also showed signs of food-processing abnormalities linked to diabetes and heart disease. Another group of volunteers on the same diet, but with glucose sugar replacing fructose, did not have these problems.

People in both groups put on a similar amount of weight. However, researchers at the University of California who conducted the trial, said the levels of weight gain among the fructose consumers would be greater over the long term.

High fructose corn syrup is in nearly everything Americans eat, from fruit juices to bread to ketchup. It’s cheap, but is such cheap sweetness worth it in the long run, when it may actually be killing us?

Child diabetes blamed on food sweetener [Times Online] (Thanks, Nadine!)

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