“Sugar was the old devil, and high-fructose corn syrup is the new
devil,” said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior analyst at Mintel
International, a market-research company.

With sugar sales up, the Sugar Association last year ended its Sweet
by Nature campaign, which pointed out that sugar is found in fruits
and vegetables, said Andy Briscoe, president of the association.
“Obviously, demand is moving in the right direction so we are taking a
break,” Mr. Briscoe said.

Dr. Robert H. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of
California, San Francisco Children’s Hospital, said: “The argument
about which is better for you, sucrose or HFCS, is garbage. Both are
equally bad for your health.”

Though research is still under way, many nutrition and obesity experts
say sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are equally bad in excess. But,
as is often the case with competing food claims, the battle is as much
about marketing as it is about science.

All of that is irrelevant to some food manufacturers, who are
switching to sugar as a result of extensive taste testing and consumer
surveys.

“For consumers, their perception is reality,” said Jim Sieple, a
senior vice president for Log Cabin syrup, a 120-year-old brand in the
Pinnacle Foods Group that this month announced it had stopped using
high-fructose corn syrup.

To researchers and nutritionists who study obesity and the effects of
sugar on the body, the resurrection of sugar is maddening.

Pat Crawford of the Center for Weight and Health at the University of
California, Berkeley, remembers when sugar was such a loaded word that
cereal makers changed the name of products like Sugar Pops to Corn
Pops.

Even though overall consumption of caloric sweeteners is starting to
drop, Dr. Crawford says an empty calorie is still an empty calorie.
And it does not matter whether people think sugar is somehow “retro,”
a word used to promote new, sugar-based versions of Pepsi and Mountain
Dew called Throwback.

“If people really want to go back to where we were, that means not
putting sugar in everything,” she said. “It means keeping it to
desserts.”

-- 
www.nytimes.com

Throwback? How about throw out ...

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