If you’re trying to avoid high fructose corn syrup — as well you should be — one of the products you’d probably gravitate to is General Mills Vanilla Chex with natural vanilla flavor and “no high fructose corn syrup” (one of several additives it claims not to contain on the front of the box).
But before you buy it, confident that it will help protect your family against the various health problems like diabetes and obesity that studies have linked to all that ‘free fructose’ in HFCS, you might also want to check out the list of actual ingredients on the side of the package.
Because one of the things you’ll find on that list is “fructose” – a term that, according to the Corn Refiners Association, is now used to describe something previously known as HFCS-90, meaning that it is 90 percent fructose, as contrasted with regular HFCS, which contains either 42 or 55 percent.
Here’s what the CRA’s website, corn.org, has to say on the subject under the section on “high fructose corn syrups” (something brought to our attention just this week by “Food Babe” Vani Hari):
“A third product, HFCS-90, is sometimes used in natural and ‘light’ foods, where very little is needed to provide sweetness. Syrups with 90% fructose will not state high fructose corn syrup on the label, they will state ‘fructose’ or ‘fructose syrup’.”
And that’s something we here at Food Identity Theft find very, very interesting – the reason being that HFCS-90 is a product that our sponsoring organization, Citizens for Health, has been concerned about for quite some time.
In fact, this past August, CFA amended a petition it had originally submitted back in 2012 to the Food and Drug Administration asking that labeling be required specifying the amounts of fructose in products containing HFCS. The petition was revised to include a request that food companies be notified that “any product containing HFCS sweetener with more than 55% fructose is considered to be adulterated” under federal regulations and “cannot be sold in interstate commerce.”
Read more on our sister site: FoodIdentityTheft.com: http://foodidentitytheft.com/whats-in-a-name-a-lot-when-the-name-is-fructose-and-the-product-its-in-claims-to-have-no-hfcs
