Collected Thoughts

HFCS is chemically altered from ordinary corn syrup to be sweeter, to appeal more strongly to the sweet-seeking chemical in the human brain. As dcjensen says, HFCS is more quickly metabolized by the system, resulting in a sugar "dump" on the bloodstream, requiring an insulin spike from the pancreas to deal with the flood of blood sugar.

Corn, despite what the industry will tell you when faced with possible use of their high-dollar food crop for vehicle fuel, is cheap and easy to grow, fairly simple and cheap to process. The chemical tweaking that turns corn syrup--used for decades as the base for baby formulas and in basic healthy recipes--into unhealthy High Fructose Corn Syrup is a marketing ploy, a way to make people use more and buy more.

And in the last few years, the prepared foods industry is adding it to everything, even things that formerly did not require sweetening. We're attuning our palates to crave the sweet, even more than before.