Answer at the bottom of this post.
We like honey pretty well at our house. I like it on toast or biscuits, sometimes in tea. So today I had some leftover honey packets from KFC and thought I'd just hang onto them in case we ever wanted some. As I was getting them put away, this caught my eye:
Excuse me? Honey Sauce? 7% real honey?? SEVEN????? Yes, there's honey in that packet; it's the 4th ingredient listed after High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, and Sugar.
Now, I'm not the first to realize this as a quick Internet search revealed. And I do realize the irony of complaining about not getting natural food from KFC, vendor of fine deep-fried food. But still, with fried chicken, I know what kind of garbage I'm eating. I like to choose my poison.
I go out of my way to minimize my intake of High Fructose Corn Syrup. The manufacturers of HFCS claim that "...your body can't tell the difference. Sugar is sugar."* However, according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, "Fructose is absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract by a different mechanism than that for glucose. Glucose stimulates insulin release from the isolated pancreas, but fructose does not."** So HFCS is not metabolized the same way as sugar. Most medical sources say that more research needs to be done to determine how HFCS affects us. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if when a restaurant asks me if I want honey, and I say yes, they would actually give me honey.
If they're not serving honey, they shouldn't be offering honey.
What do you think? Have you made any decisions about High Fructose Corn Syrup? Is this the first you've ever heard of it? Did you realize that you're not always being served honey when you're offered honey?
English Class Pop Quiz Answer: The past-tense of spread is spread, not spreaded. The past-tense of hit is hit is hit, not hitted. These are irregular verbs. But of course you knew that.
*www.sweetsurprise.com
** http://www.ajcn.org/content/86/4/895.full
