According to a new study out of Princeton, rats who have access to high fructose corn syrup become obese.
No surprise, right?
But this is compared to rats who consumed equal caloric amounts of table sugar. Those rats fared fine.
“This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.”
In addition to drastically lower activity levels, corn syrup certainly seems a likely candidate for blame for radically increased obesity levels in the US:
“In the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1970, around 15 percent of the U.S. population met the definition for obesity; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese.”
Read about the study at Princeton:
A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain