FDA – Food Dimwit Administration
This week the FDA ok’d food manufacturers use of “Natural” in labeling for High Fructose Corn Syrup. My jaw dropped.
Well, here’s the process for creating this “natural” ingredient. You be the judge.
Corn refiners separate the corn into useful manufacturing parts: starch, germ, fibre, and gluten. The corn is cleaned and then softened in hot water containing sulfurous acid. Then it’s coarsely ground to release the germ. After that a finer grind and screening separates the fiber and starch. The starch is washed over and over to produce a starch that’s as free as possible from other parts.
The starch “milk” is put into a centrifuge where it’s “dewatered”. It’s still moist, however, so the starch is placed in a “flash dryer”–hot air brings the moisture content down to 12 to 13 percent. From there, the starch is sent to a silo ready for screening and bagging.
Then, the cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce shorter chains of sugars called polysaccharides. Alpha-amylase is industrially produced by a bacterium, usually Bacillus sp. It is purified and then shipped to HFCS manufacturers.
Next, an enzyme called glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose. Unlike alpha-amylase, glucoamylase is produced by Aspergillus, a fungus, in a fermentation vat where one would likely see little balls of Aspergillus floating on the top.
The third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, is very expensive. It converts glucose to a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose with some other sugars mixed in. While alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are added directly to the slurry, pricey glucose-isomerase is packed into columns and the sugar mixture is then passed over it. Inexpensive alpha-amylase and glucoamylase are used only once, glucose-isomerase is reused until it loses most of its activity.
There are two more steps involved. First is a liquid chromatography step that takes the mixture to 90 percent fructose. Finally, this is back-blended with the original mixture to yield a final concentration of about 55 percent fructose–what the industry calls high fructose corn syrup.
Our very own government agency, the Food & Drug Administration, ok’d HFCS as a “natural” ingredient. Now, you tell me… are they just plain dimwitted? I suspect there are some perfectly normal and moderately intelligent humans over there.
Why would some perfectly normal and moderately intelligent human FDA bureaucrats make such a decision? In a word, pressure. Pressure from big money food manufacturers.
Ugly.