High-Fructose Corn Syrup

High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is an extra sweet, inexpensive sweetener used mostly in soft drinks and fruit juices.

HFCS is a sweetener made from corn, not the plants typically associated with sweetness like sugar cane and sugar beets, which give table sugar or sucrose.

It is made by milling corn into corn starch, then processing the corn starch into corn syrup, which is almost entirely composed of the sugar known as glucose. The resulting sweetener could be purified to 90 percent fructose, a product that is much sweetener than glucose or sucrose.

There are two forms of HFCS, known as HFCS 55 and HFCS 42, with the number denoting the percentage of fructose or ‘fruit sugar’.

HFCS 55 has sweetness equivalent to sucrose and is found mostly in beverages whereas HFCS 42 is less sweet and used primarily in baked goods also in many fruit-flavored noncarbonated beverages.
High-Fructose Corn Syrup