The HFCS scare is mostly a scare campaign

>I think it's ironic that after all the artificial sugar drinks/food push, all the 'diet foods', now we've come full cycle to pridefull advertising that the product is "Sweetened with Real Sugar"! I had thought that HFCS were just an alternate way of sweetening foods. I am going to be more alert to labels which indicate food is made with HFCS.<

HFCS is just an alternative way of sweetening foods. Corn is a very abundant crop in the western world; using HFCS instead of cane or beet sugar is waaaaaay cheaper for the food industry. Fads, trends, and the public's perception of things change all the time, and I guess that includes how foods are labeled, too. Nowadays people seem to want to get away from artificial stuff in their food, and there's nothing wrong with that. "Real sugar" is refined from either the sugar cane plant or the sugar beet plant and is in the form of sugar called sucrose. High fructose corn syrup is a byproduct of the corn plant, and the sugar is in the form of fructose.

If I understand my basic human digestive biology right, our bodies can't tell the diff (or they don't care). All the -oses (sucrose, fructose, glucose, can't remember if there are others) are handled the same when we swallow them. Our stomachs and intestines, along with various hormones and digestive juices, etc, are all about taking what we eat and converting most of it to glucose anyway, since that's the food our body's cells require for metabolism.

The big evil about HFCS for diabetics is that it's hiding in loads of different junky/highly processed/oversweet ened crap foods, and it's also used in lots of different sweetened drinks, including sports and so-called energy drinks, as well as lots of fruit "drinks" aimed at the kid market. IMO, unless there's a clear indication for it, like in times of illness (especially for those of us who take insulin) or to counteract lows, it'd be a better idea for all of us to stay strictly away from all refined sugar and HFCS. For us, it's poison and IMO again should have a skull and crossbones label alongside the nutritional info.

That is pretty much true. Sugar is sugar, and it is all a problem for diabetics. The HFCS scare is mostly a scare campaign. That being said, In the old days when I was a Cola freak, I could tell the difference in the cane sugar sweetened Coca-Cola and the stuff with HFCS. There was one plant here in Kentucky at that time still using cane sugar, and those were the only cokes I would drink. No more real cokes for me these days...