As enzymes replaced acids, refiners were able to produce progressively sweeter sweeteners from corn. Yet none were quite as sweet as sugar (or, to be more precise, sucrose). That threshold wasn’t crossed until the late 1960s, when Japanese chemists “broke the sweetness barrier,” in the words of the Corn Refiners Association’s official history of high-fructose corn sweetener. They discovered that an enzyme called glucose isomerase could transform glucose into the much sweeter sugar molecule called fructose. By the 1970s the process of refining corn into fructose had been perfected, and
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