Posted on 10/02/2009 9:34:30 PM PDT by neverdem
Researchers have established the conditions that foster formation of potentially dangerous levels of a toxic substance in the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) often fed to honey bees. Their study, which appears in the current issue of ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, could also help keep the substance out of soft drinks and dozens of other human foods that contain HFCS. The substance, hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), forms mainly from heating fructose.
In the new study, Blaise LeBlanc and Gillian Eggleston and colleagues note HFCS's ubiquitous usage as a sweetener in beverages and processed foods. Some commercial beekeepers also feed it to bees to increase reproduction and honey production. When exposed to warm temperatures, HFCS can form HMF and kill honeybees. Some researchers believe that HMF may be a factor in Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious disease that has killed at least one-third of the honeybee population in the United States.
The scientists measured levels of HMF in HFCS products from different manufacturers over a period of 35 days at different temperatures. As temperatures rose, levels of HMF increased steadily. Levels jumped dramatically at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. "The data are important for commercial beekeepers, for manufacturers of HFCS, and for purposes of food storage. Because HFCS is incorporated as a sweetener in many processed foods, the data from this study are important for human health as well," the report states. It adds that studies have linked HMF to DNA damage in humans. In addition, HMF breaks down in the body to other substances potentially more harmful than HMF.
SOURCE: American Chemical Society
HHMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm
/johnny
So can water.
I knew an oddball guy who would have lunch at Quiznos. He said diet coke left out in the heat was very bad for you. Could be exposed to hot sunlight in transit or storage and you drink it later obviously cooled. He would not drink it. it is not very good for you anyway.
I store my soft drinks at 125 deg. F, doesn’t everyone?
I only thought it was fattening.
HFC is one of those things I read about and think “Now, next time I go to the store I should really check the labels first”...and then I forget. Same thing with “Made in China.” :/
Aspartame does change in taste when stored at elevated temps. It isn’t supposed to be any worse for you when it has turned, but it does have an odd, metallic taste.
ping
The Craig Ferguson show is much more humorous and more fun to watch then his boss, Letterman.
??
(singing)
One of these things is not like the other,
One of these things is not quite the same...
(/singing)
Another excuse for a massive soda tax.
That could be the temperature in the trunk of a car.
Why don't you read the link? You might learn something. The HFCS-55 used in soft drinks is made from HFCS-90 and HFCS-42. HFCS-42 is used in baked/cooked/processed food.
Oh, and aren’t we condescending tonight. /s lol
Seems kind of stupid to worry about high fructose corn syrup, when aspartame is so bad for you, and it only got approved through politics and payoffs to begin with.
I don’t feed any corn syrup to my bees. and, as a chemical engineer, i’m far more worried about “sucralose” than any other sweetener.
Long live sucrose!
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/jf9014526?cookieSet=1
I have written about/against HFCS for some years - I hope it's taken our of our drinks, candies, gums, drinks, etc. SOON
There are more soda bottling companies coming out with ‘old timey’ soda made with cane sugar and in glass bottles.
I heard that Coca Cola may put their Classic Coke in glass bottles with sugar also. (Actually, it's long irritated me that they DO make coke with sugar and in glass bottles for both Canada and Mexico as those countries won't allow HFCS and they want glass bottles. So, since they do make it, why the heck can't we at least have ONE of their many different cokes this way?
I bought a couple 12-packs of “Pepsi Throwback” this summer when they put it out with real sucrose. Was quite disappointed when it went away after just a few weeks.
No HFCS for my kids when I can help it.
Long live sucrose!
ping
Try this stuff;
http://www.jonessoda.com/
I can definitely tell a difference, and it is available now. I don’t like the taste of HFCS compared to pure Cane sugar.
After that, the bigger operators would buy the stuff, literally by the tanker truck load. As one wag at Bee-L put it, though he likely was not talking about HFCS per se, ;
For lurkers, I'll share some crude background info;
Almonds need pollination in very early Spring, before bees in most locales have natural sources to build up on, or even begin to build up. The queen won't start laying in late Winter without some artificial coaxing. Bees are trucked to California from as far away as Florida & the New England states for almond pollination...
One needs a minimum of 8 full frames of bees per hive to get the high almond fee...as one result of the interplay of these conditions, corn syrup, along with pollen and other mixed proteins would be feed to help stimulate the buildup.
The HFCS had been looked at, and dismissed as being directly linked to CCD previously. This article is saying that understanding may have been wrong (at least under certain conditions)? Guess I'll have to read it. At the moment my internet connection is rather tenuous. I hope the link is clean enough that I'll be able to get it to load.
LOL!!
Source?
I’m wondering how many scary reports we’d get about cane sugar if it were renamed “HSCE (High Glucose Cane Extract).”
>> Above 86 degrees, aspartame breaks down into crap you don’t want to ingest. <<
Since the human body is 98 degrees, that doesn’t make too much sense. It does break down into trace amounts of methanol when digested.
>> It’s crap on a stick anyway, having caused cancer in rats, which they did their best to cover up. <<
Pretty impressive coverup
>> I’ve known people who drank diet soda like it was going out of style and developed brain tumors. <<
Given that a sizeable portion of Americans consume diet soda as their main source of liquid, that says only that you know people who have developed brain tumors.
>> It’s also off limits to military pilots, because of the chance of seizures. <<
Well, I know a military pilot who drinks it frequently. He must forget to abstain because of an undiagnosed brain tumor. Do you have a source?
I hate aspartame. The stuff tastes nasty to me, bearing no resemblance to sugar at all. And it slows your metabolism, so it’s of little use as a diet aid, unless you’re doing Atkins. But take off the tinfoil hat.
It isn't very long after ingestion that it is at 98.6 degrees.
I also read that it’s linked to breast cancer.
I switched from aspartame to sucralose to sweeten my iced tea. After seeing your comment, I looked up sucralose. Apparently the big concern is chlorine. What makes that more interesting to me is my blood test results from my last physical. Everything looked good except for elevated chlorides. I wonder is there is a connection. I have little doubt that the melon syrup used in the old iced green tea latte formulation at Starbucks was a prime reason for my A1C measurement at 6.2.
It's rack time here. I need to get some sleep before my mom's housekeeper rings the phone at 7:45 AM...again.
The Europeans banned HFC from the outset. We just have it here because of the corn lobby —
Now that's funny.
While I was reading this thread I was doing some searching at the same time and found that it was very very easy to find sites that claimed any sort of sweetner would kill ya; corn based, cane based and artificial.
My favorite was "James Bowen, M.D., A physician, biochemist, and survivor of aspartame poisoning warns about yet another synthetic sweetener, Splenda."
Just doggone. First you get poisoned by aspartame and then you find out that Spenda is gonna kill ya. Oh, and the "natural stuff" will, too.
I swear there is an element that is hell bent on the rest of us to live in mud huts and chew on roots with an average life span of 30 years.
You’re right. It’s the chlorine that bothers me. Replacing hydrogen with chlorine, in my experience, is how we make things like pesticides. It’s the “C” in PCB.
It just seems wrong to take a perfectly good sucrose molecule and add chlorine to it.
What they did share was precise info on how they went about the testing, and what they found, without going into ungrounded speculation.
I thank the researchers for covering the subject matter in a disciplined fashion, and thank you for posting the article and link here on FR.
There's supposed to have been a warning in an Air Force bulletin from the early 90's, based on the Navy info.
I know that when the stuff was first approved, it wasn't approved for baked goods, because it breaks down into methanol, formaldehyde, DKP and formic acid. But, like you guys said, it's going to be 98.6 after ingestion anyway, so what difference did it make?
If you've never seen it, watch Sweet Misery. I saw it last year, and it sums up a lot of the issues with Aspartame, and documents the testing, the shady trials, the in-fighting at the FDA to get it approved, and how it was ultimately approved by people in the administration, with ties to Monsanto, or people who were later given high paying jobs within Monsanto.
I used to question whether the stories were true or not, because I remember the news at the time about approving it, and the health questions, and people still remembering the saccharin scare, but after watching that documentary, I'll stick to not ingesting it.
Yep.
I get Jones soda - my favorite is their Vanilla Cream.
Now, up here in the woods, we have Maine Roots soda outfit - organic cane sugar - old fashioned root beer, Maine sarsaparilla, (my woods are full of sarsaparilla root,) Maine Pumpkin and Maine Blueberry, all in dark brown glass 'bar bottles.'
Yep. Lovin' it.
They might have in Iraq.
Your response looks a lot like one I found on another blog. They couldn’t source theirs either.
I call you on your BS. You should not spread internet lies posted by those with an agenda. Or, are you one with an agenda?
You get more methanol from fruit than you get from aspartame.
I always suspected that hot aspartame might have something to do with Gulf War Syndrome. Or Morgellans, which is more prevalent in places with warmer weather.
A piece of cr@p.
I just watched it. They blame republican operative, Donald Rumsfeld and Ronald Reagan for manipulating the approval of aspartame.
They tout Diane Fleming of being wrongly convicted of killing her husband by lacing his gatoraid with antifreeze.
They say he was killed by the 10 to 12 diet cokes he drank daily.
Never mind that he was consuming creatin at three times the recommended amounts and was a heavy drinker and his gatoraid had about 4% methanol (from the bottles recovered from his home) ....
Hmmmm. Wonder how the methanol got into his gatoraid .....
That same manual and in the same paragraph that references aspartame also references aged cheese as causing the same effects. Now I am sure that you have eliminated cheddar cheese from your diet ...
Good lord, dude, take a frigging chill pill. You want to suck down buttloads of aspartame, be my guest. You don’t want to believe it, be my guest. I remember the debates about it when it was approved. I’m not using it, but feel free to snort the stuff like cocaine if you want. Your business, buddy, but you don’t have to rail like a rhino on steroids. What, do you own Monsanto stock?
I am not the one that posted falsely. Why? What is your agenda?
Other foods listed in that same paragraph referencing aspartame include:
aged cheese, chocolate, yogurt, buttermilk, nuts,
bananas, onions, avocados, figs, and red wines, smoked
fish, hot dogs, bacon, sausage, baloney, corn beef and pastrami, oriental dishes, instant and canned soups, potato chip products, processed meat, gravies, TV dinners, and gourmet seasoning, coke, coffee, tea, and colas.
I don’t have an agenda. I just offered my opinion, what I’ve seen and what I’ve read. You don’t want to believe it, or call it bogus, then whatever, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, just like I am. Like I said, you want to take a bath in it, and sprinkle it on everything you eat, be my guest. More power to you. I’m not eating the crap.
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