As any good ISU student knows, Iowa produces a heck of a lot of corn.

This should be no surprise given the crop’s diverse uses, which include feeding cattle and fueling engines. Its most obvious use, of course, is as food itself. Far from exclusively off-the-cob or out-of-the-can consumption, corn, in some form, can be found in roughly half of the products that line our grocery stores’ shelves.

This is made possible thanks to one simple innovation: high-fructose corn syrup.

Invented in 1957 by Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi, the chemically altered corn product is produced by milling corn to create starch; treating this starch with alpha-amylase to produce short chains of sugars, called oligosaccharides; treating these oligosaccharides with glucoamylase, a fungus further breaking down the sugar chains to yield simple sugar glucose; then adding an enzyme, xylose isomerase, converting this glucose into fructose.

This lengthy, complicated and wholly unnatural process yields a substance that is essentially equivalent to table sugar. HFCS tastes the same, is used in many of the same products, and as you’ve no doubt been informed by years’ worth of commercials on the subject, provides the same calories.

The glaring difference, however, is in price. Due to two government actions — specifically the continuation of a “temporary” agricultural subsidy system created during the Great Depression and the institution in 1977 of a system of sugar tariffs and quotas — HFCS, made from a price-supported crop, is today a far more economical sweetener than sugar.

Thanks to this fact, corporate food and beverage producers, for example Archer Daniels Midland, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, long ago made the rational decision to replace sugar with HFCS in most of their products. Doing so has not only bumped up their profit margins, but has led to cheaper, and much larger, foods and beverages as well.

It’s a win-win, right?

Well, as I see it, wrong. Last year, I wrote a column in which I supported a decrease in corn subsidies. This was in part because much corn is processed into HFCS and, given its relative price to sugar and the prices of the many products in which it is a primary ingredient, this invites consumers to purchase more high-HFCS, high-calorie foods and refreshments. I went on to conclude that, given the correlation between Americans’ steady increase in overall sugar and sweetener consumption — which, notably, began in the late ’70s, when the sugar tariffs were instituted and the HFCS-making process kicked into high gear — and increase in obesity, the prevalence of HFCS indirectly contributes to obesity.

Two days after publication, I was contacted by Audrae Erickson, president of the Corn Refiners Association of America, a trade association that represents the corn-refining industry and whose leading members include Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill.

The CRA’s mission is “to dispel myths and correct inaccuracies associated with HFCS and highlight the important role this versatile sweetener plays in our nation’s food and beverages,” according to its Web site. It does this on a grand scale by launching massive advertising campaigns — the CRA is responsible for the commercials where one actor disparages a food’s HFCS content but, unable to explain why, is rebuked by the HFCS consumer, who states that “HFCS has the same calories as sugar and is fine in moderation.” On a smaller scale, the CRA apparently carries out its mission by informing opinion writers like me.

I had gained the attention of the CRA by writing “high-fructose corn syrup” and “obesity” in one paragraph, making me an alleged mythmaker whom the CRA, and specifically Erickson, was more than happy to provide with “science-based information on this safe sweetener.” As she informed me, HFCS keeps foods fresh and flavorful; negligibly affects the cost of soft drinks; is compositionally similar to and nutritionally equal to sucrose; affects appetite no differently than sugar; and is not “per se a causal factor in the overweight and obese problem in the United States,” according to the American Dietetic Association.

I had simply suggested that due to its widespread prevalence in relatively cheap foods and beverages, Americans who choose with their wallets — just about all of us — are invited to consume a large number of products containing HFCS and high calories.

Now, a year later, I still do not dispute the scientific fact that HFCS contains the same nutritional composition — specifically four calories per gram — as table sugar. But, the calories of all sweeteners may not be created equal, according to new research.

As a group of researchers from Princeton University’s psychology department and Neuroscience Institute recently discovered, male rats that ate a diet of rat chow and HFCS-sweetened water gained significantly more weight than male rats that ate a diet of rat chow and sucrose-sweetened water, even when they consumed the same amount of total calories.

Since HFCS and sucrose pack the same caloric punch, Dr. Bart Hoebel, the study’s lead researcher, and his team acknowledged that it’s somewhat of a mystery as to why this difference in weight gain occurred.

They knew that the difference in weight gain was not due to any differences in the rats, which are virtually uniform in genetic makeup, or in caloric intake, as significant differences existed between rats that consumed equivalent calories. As such, they logically pointed to some difference between HFCS and sucrose as the causal variable.

As their article points out, HFCS and sucrose might be similar sweeteners, but have two primary differences. First, sucrose is composed of 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose, whereas HFCS is composed of an imbalanced ratio. The HFCS used in the Princeton study was composed of 55 percent fructose, 42 percent glucose and 3 percent “higher saccharides” — larger sugar molecules. The second key difference is due to the manufacturing process, the fructose molecules in HFCS are free and unbound, while the fructose molecules in sucrose are bound to corresponding glucose molecules. This means that the fructose molecules in HFCS can be absorbed and utilized immediately, whereas the fructose molecules in sucrose must go through an additional metabolic step before absorption and utilization.

Regardless of its indirect, price-and prevalence-based effect on how many calories Americans consume, HFCS has a direct, metabolic-based effect on how our bodies turn calories into extra pounds.

And I wonder what the CRA has to say about that.

Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Md.