Meryl Horn

Yeah.

That high fructose corn syrup is like particularly bad for us.

Yeah.

Maybe it's a California thing.

But to find out if it's more than just bad vibes, I called up Dr. Kimber Stanhope.

She's a research nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis, and her specialty is sugar.

So she's been very popular this past news cycle.

Have you been getting flooded by requests from reporters to talk about this right now?

Definitely a lot.

You're late.

So there actually is a legit reason why high fructose corn syrup might be bad for us.

It's because of the fructose.

That's one of the basic sugar building blocks along with glucose.

And at one point, like in the 80s, scientists were thinking that fructose might actually be better for us than other stuff like glucose.

Oh.

Because fructose doesn't raise our blood sugar like glucose does.

Oh, okay.

So maybe good, especially if you have diabetes.

But those glory days of fructose didn't last long because pretty quickly, studies started coming out finding that fructose has its own set of problems.

So one big one is that it often gets turned into something called triglycerides.