The Corn Refiners Association submitted an application to the FDA in 2010 to have the product renamed on nutrition labels.
But the FDA concluded sugar is a solid, dried and crystallized food and not a syrup.
After the Corn Refiners Association, a lobbying group, began running a marketing campaign claiming high-fructose corn syrup is a form of sugar, the Western Sugar Cooperative, Michigan Sugar Co. and C&H Sugar Company filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court against the lobbying group and six corn processors.
After their initial filing, five more sugar companies joined the lawsuit seeking to prevent the corn industry from marketing high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as corn sugar.
Sugar farmers and refiners wanted the corn industry to stop marketing high fructose corn syrup as a natural product, claiming it’s the same as sugar.
Dan Callister, a lawyer for the Sugar Association, said the FDA’s decision confirms his group’s position that sugar and high fructose corn syrup are two distinct products.
“What’s going on here is basically a con game to suggest otherwise,” Callister said. “What do con men do? They normally try to change their name. The FDA has thankfully stopped that.”
Lawyers for the corn industry had argued that sugar and high fructose corn syrup are equivalent in how they are metabolized by the body which is patently false.
The extra metabolic step for fructose molecules is missing in HFCS, which is why a Princeton University research team concluded that excess fructose in HFCS is metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.
New evidence suggests a steady diet of high fructose corn syrup slows the brain, and impairs memory and learning.
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) showed how omega-3 fatty acids, mainly found in fish, can counteract the memory and learning disruption caused by elevated levels of high fructose corn syrup.
The peer-reviewed Journal of Physiology published the findings in its May 15 edition.
“Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of integrative biology and physiology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
“Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain’s ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage.”
Earlier research revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in diabetes, obesity and fatty liver, but this study is the first to uncover how high fructose corn syrup influences the brain.