Back to corn sweeteners -

The people who use fear to market their products seem to have done a good job of demonizing corn syrup.

Corn syrup has been around a long time. When I moved to Kansas City in 1976, I was made aware that there was a big business called Corn Products which shipped corn syrup out in railroad tanker cars to be used in the production of all kinds of food. Corn sweetener is not new or unusual.

Wysi mentioned allergies. Allergies are caused by proteins. Sweetener is sugar, a different kind of chemical. We should not assume [and worry] that there is a problem here. Not when the matter is so easy to check out.

There are a lot of sugars in this world, and our bodies encounter them all the time. Just from general reading I can name sucrose, dextrose, maltose, glucose, lactose and fructose. The main fuel of the body is glucose. When we eat a different kind of sugar, enzymes and whatnot appear and alter the sugar to glucose.

Now do an mental exercise. Pretend that you have developed a great recipe for salad dressing and you have a family business to produce it and sell it. Should you use corn syrup or granulated sugar for that little bit of sweetness it requires?

Let's see. The sugar crystals have these disadvantages:

they are messy to pour

they send tiny crystals into the air, and the workers are breathing them all day, every day

they are gritty and hurt the machinery

the bags could get wet and be ruined

they might crystallize in the product, infuriating the customers

Which sweetener would you use?