

Making Natural Sodas Without HFCS (It's Harder Than You Think) - starpilot
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/162/spindrift-soda

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lobster_johnson
This article is misleading for several reasons:

* The article describes a guy making sodas from _freshly made juice_. That changes the entire picture. The headline should be "Making Sodas From Freshly Squeezed Juice (It's Harder Than You Think".

* It's perfectly simple to make natural sodas with cane sugar instead of HFCS — indeed, a lot of smaller soda manufacturers in the US already use cane sugar, including such brands as Fentimans and Jones Soda. In Europe, most sodas, including Coca-Cola, are made with cane sugar, not HFCS.

* You don't have to use fresh-squeezed juice to be "natural". Fentimans, for example, uses spices and fermented juices in their sodas. The original Coca-Cola was a blend of essential oils (lime, orange, coriander, nutmeg etc.), ie. natural ingredients, and it's perfectly feasible to make sodas today using the same ingredients.

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derleth
How, specifically, is HFCS worse for you than eating honey, which is
practically all fructose?

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tzs
HFCS is probably fine, in the sense that if you took something that was
otherwise not bad for you and replaced whatever provides its sweetness with an
HFCS of the same level of sweetness, it would not make the thing bad.

The main reason that it is generally a good idea to avoid HFCS is that it is
generally NOT found replacing other sweeteners in things that are good for
you. It is generally found in things that are not good for you regardless of
how they are sweetened.

We know an impressive amount about how human nutrition works--but there is
much more that we don't know. When some giant food company decides to make
something by taking ingredients, breaking them down, and putting them together
in some new engineered food there are two risks. (1) Being good for you may
not have been high on the design requirements. Shelf life, consistency, ease
of manufacture, cost, and marketing concerns could all be higher on the list.
(2) Even if being good for you was a high priority, they might not actually
achieve that due to our incomplete knowledge of human nutrition.

When you see HFCS on the label, you know there is a really good chance you are
dealing with an engineered food.

In other words, HFCS is not bad--it just keeps bad company.

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derleth
> When you see HFCS on the label, you know there is a really good chance you
> are dealing with an engineered food.

In an otherwise good post, I have to respond to this.

Every plant you eat is engineered. They're all, or almost all, the result of
genetic modification in the form of selective breeding, often to the point the
result would not survive but for constant human intervention.

In a larger sense, all prepared food is engineered, often with complex
chemical reactions going on as it is being prepared. Baking in particular is
an exact science, and quite distinct from cooking, due to the chemistry
required to make everything come out right.

So 'engineered' isn't bad; 'badly engineered' (or, at least, 'engineered in
unhealthy ways') is bad, and then list the ways it is bad. Don't just wave
'engineered' and 'unnatural' around as slurs. Food is too important for that.

