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Yesterday, I picked up a box of a new kind of “natural” chewy granola bars made by Quaker Oats. The first thought I had was that chewy granola bars do not occur in nature, but that if they had, human beings may have never invented civilization.

I looked at the ingredients label, my eyes well-trained by books like Omnivore’s Dilemma to search for the villain high fructose corn syrup. It wasn’t there. In its place was another syrup - brown rice syrup.

“Well, that ought to be better,” I thought, then quickly reconsidered that conclusion. After all, brown rice is healthier than white rice because it remains mostly whole during the cooking process, retaining more nutritious parts like the germ. I’m not a nutritionist or anything, but it seems highly unlikely to me that those same parts remain for the production of brown rice syrup.

So, what would make brown rice syrup more healthy than high fructose corn syrup?