High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS): Detrimental to Brain Function

May 2nd, 2009 | Brain Food

It should come to no surprise that what’s good for the brain is also what’s good for your overall bodily health. The inverse is also correct, what’s bad for your body is also bad for your brain. Today, I will be focusing on High Fructose Corn Syrup. Growing up in in America during the mid 70’s and early 80’s, I latered learned that I was one of the first wave of consumers to be pumped with this funny sounding food source called High Fructose Corn Syrup. I would slather my pancakes in this HFCS. This clear gooey liquid was sweeter than anything a kid could imagine. As a child, I often pondered how they got the HFCS from the corn. I had tasted corn and didn’t gather any level of sweetness that the HFCS clearly possessed. After years of asking my mentors, aunts and uncles about how HFCS was made -- no one had an answer for me and I, too, found myself becoming less interested in how HFCS was produced.

Fortunately, I learned about HFCS and how it was manufactured during a Health Fair at a previous place of occupation. I discovered the ill side affects that HFCS can have on your overall well being -- not to mention brain function. I became curious and began to conduct my own research into this quandry that would baffle most lest for the scientific community that is well versed in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) To my surprise, almost everything I was reading about HFCS was positioned around the ill effects that HFCS could have on the body and brain function.

As a GMO, the HFCS is foreign to the human body. Throughout history, the human body has evolved to live in synergy and harmony with the food that the Earth and nature have provided. The human body is very familiar with natural unadulterated foods that still remain untouched by science and technology. Due to the artificial nature of HFCS, the human body gets “confused” as to what is to be done with this HFCS. Essentially, the body does not know what to do with this material and consequently puts it into storage to be sorted out later. Unfortunately, that storing process has thrown our bodies and brains our of balance.

Check this statistic out: The average American consumes roughly 145 pounds of HFCS in one year. More often that not, most people don’t even realize that they’re ingesting HFCS. HFCS can be found in almost every food item available at your local grocer. The next time you go food shopping and you’re in the bread isle, take a quick glance at the ingredient listings for various brands of bread available. I guarantee that, at least, 80% of the brands you research will contain HFCS. Soft drinks are comprised basically of water, HFCS, coloring and artificial flavoring -- essentially, diluted HFCS.

Ok, now that I’ve outlined how prevalent HFCS is in American diets, let’s look at how it can adversely affect your health and overall well being. Being a foreign entity to the human body, HFCS prevents the brain from registering it as a food source and therefore does not “count” HFCS’s caloric value. This circumstance promotes overeating and over time can eventually lead to obesity. In a recent study peformed by the American Medical Association, there is compelling evidence linking HFCS to the activation of a gene that promotes obesity. A part of this chain reacting effect is the liver. The liver is there to process out all the wastes and toxins from your body. The liver is also responsible for elminating excess fats from the bloodstream. Consuming a diet laiden with HFCS forces the liver to work extra hard to eliminate excess fat from the bloodstream. Love your liver people, it’s the only one you got.

Now, let’s have a look at how HFCS can adversely affect the brain. HFCS itself, being a GMO food starts off with a strike against it due to the body’s inability to process it as it would any naturally derived food. The body is confused and has to find a way to deal with these foreign entities. Storing them within in the body provides zero nutritional value to you and your brain. So, essentially, your body has done the work of processing this HFCS without receiving anything in return. Your body just did all that work for nothing. In addition to the empty nutritional value, HFCS has recently been discovered to contain levels of mercury. Even low levels of mercury have damaging effects on the nervous systems of fetuses and babies. This most certainly includeds brain development as well. Mercury exposure is just as dangerous to adults as it is in children and can adversely affect the brain’s memory and motor skill functions.

In summary, HFCS is certainly not considerd a food for the brain. HFCS is an ingredient in almost all shelf life products available at your local supermarket. I strongly suggest reducing or eliminating HFCS from your diet to give your brain and body a chance to repair itself from the daily rigors that HFCS places on your body. There may be some readers who do not agree with this post and I want to iterate that I respect your opinions and am simply offering this posting up as a source of knowledge. We all have the right to choose how we take care of ourselves, my purpose is to keep those choices, informed choices. Be well my friends.

In this post, I wanted to focus more on the negative effects of HFCS on the human body. However, as readers of the Better Brain Blog, I’m sure that many of your are curious as to how and why HFCS got into almost every food product available in the United States of America. Again, I want to emphasize that I am merely presenting empirical data that you can choose to discard or absorb. The choice is yours. Now, without further ado, I present a 20 minute excerpt from the compelling documentary, King Corn.