High
fructose corn syrup is exactly what it sounds like. It is added to a
lot of
food products here in the USA, notably
soft drinks. It is used so extensively for three reasons:
- It's cheap (this is the principal reason)
- It's sweeter than plain sugar
- In acidic mixtures, such as many soft drinks, sucrose will become hydrolyzed with time; high fructose corn syrup doesn't have that problem
High fructose corn syrup is sometimes known as
isoglucose outside the US. From what I understand, it came into widespread use in the late 1960s after the
Japanese discovered a more stable way to produce it. The syrup is manufactured from
cornstarch by liquefying it and
hydrolyzing it with
enzymes to produce a
glucose syrup. Through another
enzyme process, the
glucose is converted to
fructose, which is sweeter than glucose and thus more useful for the food
industry.
Among the other uses for high fructose corn syrup other than a drink sweetener that I know of, it is used in cheaper ice cream instead of (or along with) sugar because it lowers the freezing point less. Also, it is used in jams, candies, canning, and all kinds of other stuff because sucrose (sugar) will eventually crystallize but high fructose corn syrup will not.
I don't like high fructose corn syrup myself, because when there's enough of it, it burns my throat and has a lousy aftertaste. The reason those Torani syrups are so expensive is that they contain pure cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I use them to make my own soda sometimes, and I think it tastes a lot better. Drinks and candy for young children (à la SqueezeIt) contain such high amounts of weird stuff (including high fructose corn syrup) that they become undrinkable once you get past a certain age.