Why blame fructose?

Cory Doctorow opines,

I've regarded high-fructose corn syrup as a kind of toxic waste, present in an unbelievable amount of processed/packaged food....avoiding this stuff (if you can) is a pretty good idea. I'm game: the last time I binged on sweet food laden with HFCS, I found myself miserable, tired, and hung-over for days afterwards.

Todd Seavey, of the American Council on Science and Health, dismisses Nicholas Kristof's worries about it. Kristof says,

Some studies indicate that the body metabolizes fructose differently from other sugars, so that the body is slower to get the message that it should stop eating....There's also a circumstantial case against high-fructose corn syrup, because it began to be used widely in the 1970s, just when American stomachs started ballooning.

Seavey points out

The body metabolizes a lot of things differently from a lot of other things, and this doesn't necessarily make any of them creepy or sinister -- again, watch your resulting weight, not vilified ingredients [and] a lot of things began being more widely used in the 70s -- including videogames, VCRs, and other gadgets that have contributed to people spending less time moving around -- but singling out one substance as the culprit is nonsense. Comparable weight gain has occurred in Mexico, and they did not use high-fructose corn syrup in amounts comparable to the U.S. until recently. There must be other factors at work.

Cecil Adams essentially agrees:

I won't say HFCS has nothing to do with obesity. But to focus on the stuff when there are so many other plausible explanations for American rotundity seems perverse. For one thing, we're eating more in general. One study says our average daily food intake increased from about 1,800 calories in 1989-91 to 2,000 in 1994-96. Much of that is surely due to fizzy beverages. Per capita soft drink consumption has doubled since 1970; the typical American currently consumes 56 gallons per year.

Is that increase due strictly to the allure of HFCS? Not likely. Sales of diet pop have increased at an even faster rate than that of the sugared kind, suggesting that we're not just overdoing HFCS-sweetened foods, we're consuming too much sweetened everything. Supersized portions and changes in eating habits no doubt partly explain why--the percentage of food kids get from restaurants and fast-food outlets increased almost 300 percent between 1977 and 1996. Critser's book includes a graphic showing that the rise in U.S. obesity roughly paralleled the rate at which junk-food products were introduced. Lack of exercise is a factor too. Obesity is lowest among kids who watch an hour or less of TV daily, highest among those who watch four hours or more.

There's also the question of whether over-priced sugar has contributed to the increased use of corn syrup.