Another charge leveled at HFCS is that, unlike natural sweeteners, it delays satiety and, due to its enhanced sweetness, encourages excessive consumption. But here, too, the evidence is shaky. In 2007 the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study comparing the relative impact of sucrose-based and HFCS-based soft drinks on human taste. The authors "found no difference between sucrose- and HFCS-sweetened colas in perceived sweetness, hunger, satiety profiles, or energy intakes." In 2009 an article published in the Journal of Nutrition cited the satiety study to highlight the "misconception that HFCS has a unique and substantive responsibility for the current obesity crisis." The authors added that "inaccurate information from ostensibly reliable sources" as well as many other factors "have misled the uninformed."

All of this makes me wonder: Could it be that Big Corn is being pressured to rebrand not due to an abundance of hard evidence that HFCS is an unusually dangerous sweetener, but rather because of the skewed assessments of food writers who have set out to deem HFCS the sole harbinger of civilization's decline into epidemical obesity?

To appreciate exactly how the media has been less than true to the science of HFCS and obesity, begin with the December 13, 2009 issue of the London Times. In it, Lois Rogers summarized a University of California study that evaluated the impact of fructose on obesity. She quoted the lead scientist as saying, "This is first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently of causing simple weight gain." Put simply, fructose—which is simple fruit sugar—can be bad for us.

But Rogers, as Dan Mitchell reported in Slate, somehow got it in her head that fructose and high-fructose corn syrup were the same thing. Here's her lead: "Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks [that is, HFCS] can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis."

This viral sentence—one that should have referred to fructose—infected the entire article. Unsuspecting readers were led to believe that fructose was a sweetener solely derived from corn and, more alarmingly, that it was interchangeable with HFCS. The scientist quoted in the piece later remarked that "almost every sentence in the article contained at least one inaccurate statement."

The article, of course, proliferated. Two days after the Times piece ran, Tom Laskawy, writing for the popular environmental website Grist.com, rehashed it. High-fructose corn syrup, he began, was "fueling the obesity crisis." He then replicated the same errors that marred Rogers' debacle. Grist admirably rectified the article's mistakes, but the writer remained petulantly defiant. He responded to the revelation of the Times's inaccuracy in less than humble terms: "Oh, and in case anyone from the Times of London is reading this, if you think I will ever link to or quote from one of your articles again, then you've been drinking too much of the Kool-Aid that your boss Rupert Murdoch hands out."