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If you want to chop down drastically the amount of processed meals you eat, do not buy something that has high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in it. Unfortunately, you will need to have a robust liking for the taste of lettuce and notebook paper, as a result of HFCS is in nearly every little thing: jelly, juice, sodas, entire-grain breads, cereals, ketchup, crackers, yogurt, sweet pickles, applesauce, salad dressing, ice cream, cough syrup and plenty more. So what is it? First, let's take a look at fructose. Fructose is a naturally occurring easy sugar that is produced by many plants. It's totally sweet, and it is extra soluble in water than glucose, another simple sugar that's also made readily obtainable by nature and is the body's predominant source of energy. Fructose and glucose have the identical sort of atoms but are put collectively in a different way. When you combine fructose with glucose, you wind up with sucrose, which is your basic table sugar. There is no fructose in corn syrup -- not naturally, not less than. In 1957, researchers found an enzyme that might flip the glucose in corn syrup into fructose. This process was modified and improved upon within the 1970s, making it doable to mass-produce HFCS. Your entire process includes a number of steps and three different enzymes, but ultimately a syrup with around ninety percent fructose content is created, and that is blended down with untreated syrup (containing solely glucose) into a mixture of either 42 % or 55 p.c fructose. The remaining is glucose. Knowing that it tastes delicious, ought to we go forward and assume high-fructose corn syrup is also incredibly bad for us?