Glucose Liquid Information

Glucose liquid, commonly known as "liquid glucose" or "glucose syrup," is a carbohydrate widely used by the food and beverage industry as a sweetener. Dextrose is one kind of glucose syrup that is used as a sweetener, but liquid glucose is also important for the role it plays in creating high-fructose corn syrup.

Composition

• Carbohydrates in foods are responsible for most of the calories in our diet. Glucose is a type of carbohydrate called a monosaccharide or single ("mono-") sugar. Monosaccharides can be linked together to form disaccharides or double ("di-") sugars. The common table sugar you sprinkle on your breakfast cereal or stir in your coffee is a disaccharide, sucrose, made up of glucose and fructose.

  Although carbohydrates occur in food naturally, they can also be added to food and beverages by the industry to sweeten products like canned soda. The glucose syrup that's used for this purpose comes from corn starch.

Process

• The glucose syrup used as a sweetener comes from the starch in corn. Starch is a polysaccharide in which many ("poly-") monosaccharides are linked together in a chain. A chemical reaction called "hydrolysis" uses water ("hydro-") to break down corn starch into glucose. Sweeteners made from corn starch are called corn syrups.

Types

• There are two kinds of corn syrup used by the food and beverage industry as sweeteners, glucose syrups and high-fructose corn syrups. The glucose syrup dextrose is frequently used as as sweetener, but glucose is also important to the food and beverage industry because it is used to make high-fructose corn syrup. Fructose, like glucose, is a monosaccharide. To make high-fructose corn syrup, glucose is converted into fructose, and the glucose and fructose are then blended together.

Significance

• Because fructose is the sweetest single sugar, the amount of fructose in a sweetener determines the sweetness. Companies that produce corn syrups measure their sweetness against the sweetness of sucrose (ordinary sugar), which, remember, is a blend of glucose and fructose. Despite the moniker "high-fructose," corn syrups sometimes actually use less fructose than is found in sucrose, although they can also use more.

Criticism

• A lot of criticism has been directed against the use of high-fructose corn syrups by the food and beverage industry because of studies linking high consumption of sweetened beverages to obesity. However, according to Michelle Koroza in a May 1, 2005 article in Food Product Design by Elaine Knehr, the types of high-fructose corn syrups that are most commonly used have a fructose level of 42 or 55 percent. Koroza, a food scientist for the company Tate & Lyle, Decatur, Ill., which produces corn sweeteners, explains that relative to sugar, a corn syrup with a 55 percent fructose level has 99 percent sweetness. In other words, it has nearly the same sweetness as sugar.

Relevance

• Of course, if high-fructose corn syrup is no worse for health than ordinary sugar, that does not make it better. Sometimes, though, all that's desired is a touch of sweetness, along with other qualities that make the food attractive. Dextrose, which has 67 percent of the sweetness to sugar, gives sausages their brown color and sweet flavor.