Should you be afraid of high fructose corn syrup?

No. No you shouldn't.

...

Yeah, I know, you've heard that HFC causes all kinds of things from obesity, diabeetus, and high blood pressure to heart attacks and cancer! Everyone's heard about how bad HFC is for us. Well, the truth is, HFC is not dangerous and it isn't the cause of modern American obesity.

HFC is a sugar and, chemically speaking, a sugar is a sugar is a sugar. There are lots of sugars: glucose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and many others. Your body, assuming you aren't a diabetic or lactose intolerant, treats them all generally the same way, that is as a sugar. That means that your table sugar and that "healthier" raw sugar, are just different combinations of the same simple sugars. The flavor may be different, but your body breaks them down easily with no regard to flavor.

So why have you hear SO MUCH BS about HFC? Because somewhere someone reported that ingesting large amounts of HFC can cause cause obesity, which can lead to diabeetus (and then idiots on the Internet lay on the cancer BS). What everyone neglects to mention immediately following that is that EVERY SUGAR CAN DO THAT. If you eat two pounds of table sugar a day, you gonna get fat and are increasing your chances of getting diabeetus. Remember how eating anything to excess is bad for you? That's true here. A diet with HFC in it is not automatically worse than a diet high in honey, which is largely fructose as well.

As our country becomes more and more health obsessed, people continue to look for single bullet causes for obesity. There isn't one. Still, HFC is popular because it is cheap and readily available, so people will try to blame it. But the problem lies not with HFC, but with stupid people who drink the equivalent of two pounds of sugar in soda a day, or have a high calorie diet with a lot of HFC in it in some other form.

So don't avoid HFC as a sweetener. It won't cause cancer, it won't give you diabeetus, and it certainly won't make you fat. Eating like a fatass and not exercising will make you fat.