Reading the labels

High Fructose Corn Syrup — which the corn refiners are trying to get renamed to “corn sugar” — has been in the news a lot lately. I’m not fond of ingesting, or letting my son ingest, things that have been found to contain mercury, so we’re trying to stay away from HFCS. And so we’ve been reading labels. Lots and lots of labels.First on the list to go was factory-produced breads. Believe it or not, most of them contain HFCS. So now we buy what they bake on the premises at Wegmans.

Corn Flakes (yes, plain Corn Flakes!) is no longer welcome in our house due to the pernicious presence. Amazingly, Wegmans Brand Marshmallow Treasures is HFCS-free. I can’t pronounce everything else it contains, but it doesn’t have that.

Cheerios is HFCS-free. Yay Cheerios!

Old Dominion Root Beer has no HFCS. It is made from cane sugar and honey. And it used to be produced locally. I miss Old Dominion, don’t you?

Global Foods Mart has an enormous offering of packaged foods that don’t contain HFCS.

In general, the fresher and less packaged the product, the less likely it will be to contain HFCS. Just read the labels.

4 thoughts on “Reading the labels

  1. Paradox13

    We are doing our best to go HFCS and Transfat free in our house, too. Mostly for the benefit of the kids.

    One of the things that was amazing to me was the fact that Ketchup has a lot of HFCS in it! I now buy organic Ketchup when I can. As for bread, I enjoy the HFCS-free Wegmans Italian bread.

  2. Dave Nemetz

    I just saw that Nature’s Own breads, found in the bread aisle of all the supermarkets (and my own personal preference) are now HFCS-free as well.

  3. Dave Nemetz

    has recently removed HFCS from it’s ingredients, as well. This is especially important for me, as I was using a natural, powdered electrolyte replacement drink in my running/training, since the bottled electrolyte drinks all contained HFCS. It was a hassle mixing up the drink every night, but at last it was natural. Powerade still contains HFCS, and when Gatorade made the switch, it made it easy; I was on-board.

    Gatorade isn’t as sweet as it once was (I’d imagine because of the loss of the HFCS), but it’s not bad.

    As for the other foods, I imagine I’ll have to examine my breakfast cereals now. I ususlly eat Kashi or Cheerios, but I don’t know if Kashi contains HFCS or not.

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