So the corn industry has commercials and even a damn website heralding the greatness of "all natural" high fructose corn syrup. It's atrocious, it reminds me if the Carbon dioxide is life! pro-pollution (er, anti-global warming alarmism) commercials that were around a couple of years ago. "We are big business, and with our gobs of cash we promise to help you help us make more gobs of cash." Anyway...

Just for fun, lets compare what goes into production of regular sugar vs. corn syrup.

Sugar Production entails:
*Crush sugar cane, extract and filter juice.
*Treat with lime to neutralize and remove impurities.
*Boil for a bit
*Remove sediment from the bottom, skim off the gunk on top
*Cool/evaporate and remove syrup to get crystals.
*Use as is (raw), or make white refined sugar we all have in our kitchen with additional filtering of impurities using something like charcoal.

HFCS production entails:
*Steep corn for a couple days, it ferments a bit.
*Separate Germ from Endosperm
*Grind the above seperately.
*Remove starch from each by washing.
*Separate starch from gluten and dry it.
*Cornstarch is treated with alpha-amylase to produce oligosaccharides (shorter chains of sugars)
*Glucoamylase breaks the sugar chains down even further to yield the simple sugar glucose.
*Xylose isomerase (aka glucose isomerase) converts glucose to a mixture of about 42% fructose and 50–52% glucose with some other sugars mixed in.

Which could you do completely on your own, without, say, a chemist? Which sounds more "natural" to you?

Edit: I completely forgot honey! Here's how you make honey (after the bees are done workiing): remove honey from honeycomb, strain (gets out the chunks), filter (optional - high-pressure with fine filter - gets out the pollen but also some nutrients), done. How's that for natural?