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Fructose Linked to Obesity, Diabetes
Engineer-Poet writes "Eurekalert announces that researchers at the University of Florida have demonstrated a link between fructose consumption and metabolic syndrome (a precursor of adult-onset diabetes). In part, it makes you feel hungrier than you should be. This is particularly bad for Americans, because sugar price supports have created a market for fructose as a substitute in almost everything.
Dr. Richard J. Johnson says, "If you feed fructose to animals they rapidly become obese, with all features of the metabolic syndrome, so there is this strong causal link. And a high-fructose intake has been shown to induce certain features of the metabolic syndrome pretty rapidly in people."
Eating fructose causes a rise in uric acid in the bloodstream. Uric acid in turn blocks the action of insulin, which regulates metabolism (including uptake by fat cells). Elevated uric acid levels can eventually cause features of metabolic syndrome, including high blood pressure, obesity and high cholesterol. The good news is that the action of uric acid can be blocked with drugs, and we can change what we eat. If enough of us boycott fructose and corn-syrup products, the market will respond."
That I welcome our Fructose Overlords.
(BTW, anyone else skeptical of getting info from a Dr. Dick Johnson?)
The opposite of progress is congress
Now if we could get the sugar lobbies to allow the lowering of cane sugar import tariffs, we might see healthier food.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Kool Aid is much cheaper than pop and doesn't make you belch. Maybe it's healthier, too, because it uses table sugar (sucrose).
This is all just another reason that the free market should be left to do its job without politicians mucking in it. My dad used to run a few soft drink factories and he would've liked to use real sugar, but it would be impossible to do so because it's too damn expensive.
Go to the store (in the USA) and find a soft drink made with real sugar. Now look at the price tag. Odds are it costs twice as much as its corn-syrup and diet competitors, just for the cost of sugar alone! Where's the freedom, both for the business and the consumer?
I'd be interested to see how the prevelance of obesity and diabetes compares against the average intake of fructose in americans over the last few decades. Perhpas it would strengthen that "casual relationship" they've found.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
The good news is that the action of uric acid can be blocked with drugs
Shouldn't that read: now we know the cause of the problem is fructose, we can avoid consuming too much of it?
Christ, typical fucking Yanks. "I'm fat, but instead of eating fewer double-happy-McLard-cheeseburgers, I'll take diet pills and throw up after eating!"
I'm not saying the study is wrong, but it does beg the question -- what would be different with dextrose overdosing? BTW, I don't believe that high-fructose corn-syrup is more than ~30% fructose (bal dextrose).
So as someone with incredibly high (I'd even go at far as saying overactive) metabolism and who is way underweight because of it, should I start loading my diet with lots of fructose and corn-syrup so I actually gain a little mass?
Or will this eventually make my heart stop, or cause me some other unwanted health issues?
Fructose is the sugar in fruit. Is it intended that you don't eat fruit?
Science if frequently arduous and sometimes boring. But over-selling is not an answer.
No more half-gallons of orange juice every couple days. Better lay off the egg-nog, too.
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Yea good luck with that one. I try to prepare as much of my food as I can myself, to eliminate HFCS, but it's not economically feasable for a single guy who wants to spend his free time doing something other than cooking and/or "protesting".
I can't stand HFCS. I drink Diet Coke because the real thing started giving me heartburn when they dropped Cane Sugar.
I can't realistically eliminate it from my diet until I can either afford to buy "health food alternatives" (which don't exist for everyting) all the time, or can find a wife to work for the both of us so I can do the cooking
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Fructose facts. It seems that people who eat fructose should be careful that they get enough copper.
Corrected Link:
Fructose facts. It seems that people who eat fructose should be careful that they get enough copper.
Well, fruit has a whole bunch of nutrients to go with the fructose. It's one thing to eat a fruit-sized portion of fructose with the fruit -- it's another to extract another 30% from alternate sources and eat it with refined carbohydrates.
Think of it this way: your body needs a certain amount of sodium to function, but if you eat too much, it'll cause you problems.
It' s a confirmation of previous research. What's news it the fact that it *is* news. And yes, I've read that the upsurge in obesity tracks furctose consumption. The upsurge in obesity does not track protein or fat consumption.
I agree exactly. But the article linked by Slashdot and the second article to which I linked is saying that fructose is bad, period. The entire animal kingdom has a history of tens of millions of years of eating fruit. And now fruit is poisonous to some degree? Something is wrong somewhere.
The entire reason plants invented fruit is to encourage animals to eat it and drop the seeds somewhere where another fruit tree will grow. Is this alliance suspect?
Suppose that magic pill X and ascetic self-denial Y (excercise, refusing food, etc) have identical health-promoting effect. That's quite plausible, given sufficiently knowledgable science. Why do people constantly hate on X and praise Y? The only functional difference is that X is pleasant and Y isn't. Thus I conclude, what we have here is no more and no less than the old puritan idea that pleasure is sinful and pain is holy. It's not the fat or the fructose you hate, it's the burger.
The problem is we're simply not designed to process the amount of sugar in the average north american diet (sugar, sucrose, fructose or othewise).
Apparently the average american consumes around 150 pounds of sugar per year. That's a whole person worth of sugar each year. Now I'm sure that includes lots of sugar alternatives, but the point remains that sweetners have invaded almost all mass produced processed foods in the western diet.
You can see the problem when you consider the diet of pre-industrial man. For the majority of our evolution, sweet things have been very few and far between. We didn't have access to fruit in the kind of abundance we do today, let alone sugar! If ancient man wanted something sweet, he'd either have to find a bee-hive (not an every day event), or - if he lived where sugar cane is indigineous (very few did) he might be able to chop down some of that and chew on it. Otherwise, he was out of luck. Nothing sweet in the diet. Nothing at all.
We simply have not evolved the metabolism capable of processing the vast volumes of sugar we ingest every year. Something to think about over the holidays as you chew on your candy canes, ginger bread, cookies, cake and whatever else comes your way!
Everything is poisonous to some degree, even water. Just depends how much you consume.
There's a book "fatland" that discusses this fructose issue. Basically the rise in obesity in the USA can be pretty much directly linked to the switching from sucrose to fructose as the sugar in foods. The reason for the switch was apparenly driven by some laws changed to help American corn farmers, and also some deal with the philipines. Anyway, whatever the historical details, now fructose is cheaper, so it's used widely.
It takes a different route to the the liver & kidneys than sucrose, and for whatever biological reason this causes the tendency towards obesity and diabetes.
As for the fruit, well, indeed that's what everybody thinks, and the reason nobody thought it would be harmful. It's just "sugar from fruit" after all. The amount of sugar consumed today however is many times greater than whatever amount was in the of fruit eaten through out human history. Remember you are not eating fruit. You are eating processed food and drinks laden with (much more) fructose. There is a difference.
Some of the details in my post are probably incorrect or a bit vague, so sorry for that, but I don't remember everything I read about it. I remember it was enough to make me cut out cola from my diet (and I'm not even fat, just the opposite).
Are you surprised? Everyday some bullshit study comes out trying to tell everyone what is good and bad for you. Eggs have been eaten for thousands of years. Then they decided it is no good for you, people started eating the whites only, or switching to fake eggs. FAKE EGGS??? What the fuck is wrong with people who by into this bullshit. The study was most likely funded by the Egg-Beaters parent company in an effort to increase sales. Then finally someone not on the take and with some credibility studied the situation and said "This is fucked, eggs are fine."
The point is the modern diet has changed so drastically in the last 60 years with the advent of processed foods, the replacement of butter with hydrogenated oils (aka trans-fats), and bullshit diet products that may lack calories but almost all have been proven to be poison to your body, even though the FDA looks the other way and allows them to market.
You know, it disgusts me when I go to the store and I see a product with a big splash graphic claiming no trans fats, yet when you read the ingredient it has hydrogenated oil which IS TRANS FAT!! It gets harder and harder all the time to eat right. It amazes me that animals are fed ground up parts of other animals. What the fuck is that all about. Cows are meant to eat grass not ground up cow bones and innards. Agriculture is just another business now which rely on pesticides or genetically modified plants. Seriously what kind of fucking moron thought it would be a good idea to do this? Yeah yeah, third world countries could grow more crops, blah blah blah. What if those crops in the long run actually poison the people? The long term effects of this shit has not been tested, the technology has only been around for a few years. And it is god damn scary that that a farmer cannot keep the seeds from a crop and grow another one the next year. It also amazes me that they allow animals to eat the GM food but won't allow it in the human food chain. Hell-fuckin-lo who the fuck eats the animals (besides other animals). We do so that shit ends up in our systems anyway. Well at least we will take comfort in knowing that in a few years we will all be Roundup resistant, unfortunately so will all the other bugs and fungi and whatever the hell else can ruin a crop.
Holy shit what a rant!!!
I guess that is it, there might be a point in there somewhere. Merry Christmas!
The basis of Atkins diet is the drastic reduction of sugar in it's various forms from your diet. Practically, every word that ends with "...ose" (fructose, lactose etc) is sugar. Dr. Atkins started his campaign against the mass consumtion of sugars in cabonated drinks, refined carbohidrates, starches etc back in the 70's. This is one of the reasons that the interested industries did everything in their powers to stop his research and promoted a campaign of ridiculling his claims. I can tell you that after eliminating sugar and related from my diet I lost a lot of wight, and kept it off for more than 2 years and running. All the result of the study were documented in the Atkins books for a long time. This study is just one in a more recent trend confirming his research and it shows that the "food piramid", along with the FDA and the medical establishment, which aproved and promoted the piramid, are partially responsable for the epidemic of type 2 diabeties and obesities.
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I'm looking for the phrase "compared to", and I'm not seeing it. What was their control group? If it was rats recieving no sugar, for example, there's something seriously wrong with that study.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
While pretty much every soda I've seen uses high fructose corn syrup, including Dr. Pepper, the original Dr. Pepper using pure cane sugar is still being sold in certain stores. The most obvious locations being the Dr. Pepper Museum in Waco, TX, and the bottling plant in Dublin, TX. Check google for a store carrying this near you. In my opinion, it doesn't taste any different.
"Why should we expect that any new miracle cure offered by the pharmaceutical industry will offer us a simple, side-effect-free solution to over-eating?" - why shouldn't it?
Note that dieting is hardly free from side-effects! There are long and short term risks to health even without "overdosing" and going anorexic. Even more so from fad diets. My friend got gout from doing the low-carb diet; that's incurable. Similar disclaimers apply to excercise. When they say "consult your doctor first", they mean it!
Basically all the ascetic forms of self-improvement are blunt tools that rely upon facilities which exist as accidents of evolution. There's no reason to assume that medical science can't improve upon them!
News like that makes me want a coke (rum optional.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Cutting HCFS demand would probably lead to more of it being burned as motor fuel (ethanol). This is a wasteful process with a very poor EROEI; the most optimistic calculations thus far show that you need at least 6/10 of a gallon-equivalent of other fuel to get a gallon of ethanol out (and the usual figure is more like 3/4).
This is one of the reasons I wrote this rant about ethanol (and also a FAQ entry on it).
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I've always have extreme difficulty keeping my weight down in spite of exercise and a "balanced" diet. When I hit 230 lbs and realized I was a good candidate for diabetes, I began a low carb diet. It worked pretty well for over a year, and I lost about 20 pounds. I'm pretty positive my body was somewhat insulin resistant, and a low-carb diet was the first diet that ever made me feel healthier.
Then I decided to let it slide for a while as I made a big shift in my life and moved abroad. For two months I reverted to my old eating habits: lots of bread, and too much sugar (including products with too much fructose). In the space of those 2 months, I started gaining weight, getting sick, having vision problems, and so on. I got back on the low-carb kick, and I'm growing healthy again. I've also lost another 18 pounds in three months, just thanks to a good diet and some daily walking or biking.
If you have a poor metabolism or suspect you're insulin-resistant, I can't say enough good things about the Atkins diet. You feel better and more energetic too, without the carb-induced blood sugar highs and lows that can lead to physical and mental malaise. Sugar is intended for our bodies to be a source of emergency energy, not a food staple. Fats, proteins, vitamins, amino acids, and minerals are essential for life; starches and sugars are not.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
I'm not sure if there's stats here about how fructose intake (and sugar intake in general) have increased, but the CDC has a site about obesity trends that has a PowerPoint presentation you can download to see how obesity has sharply risen in the past twenty years.
The site Ban Trans Fats also has the data for 1985-2001 on the web page I just linked so that you can see the maps without PowerPoint. It's insane. In 1985, the fattest states had overweight people making up 10-14% of their population. About half the states had map of incidents of type 2 diabetes from the CDC also corresponds nicely to the fattest areas of the nation.
This is a public health crisis regardless of the cause. I've read several books on diet and health, and I'm just staying away from what's generally agreed to be crap nowdays -- foods with added sugars, refined starches, and trans fats. I don't eat fast food and junk food anymore, and neither should you or anyone else you love. Avoiding sugars (outside of fruits) and starches is key to keeping hunger under control and trans fats are just bad, bad, bad for you.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
One possible reason for this which I've heard about is that yes, blood sugar levels raises slow of fructose, but that is because it has to be broken down in the liver before if can reach the blood and if the liver aren't full of carbs it's likely to just stay there instead. And then the reason that it skips two of the regular carb steps then metabolised so the body doesn't react on it like it does with other carbohydrates.
As per the subject, fruits have a lot less sugar than you think.
The problem is that the average American eats a lot more sugar than they used to. Americans eat an estimated 20-34 teaspoons of added sugar in the food and drink every day. While you probably shouldn't be chugging apple juice all day, it would be a far sight better for you than chugging Coke all day. However, there's no need to avoid whole fruits whatsoever. Go wild.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Dublin Dr. Pepper (in Texas) still uses pure cane sugar. And the stuff is the nectar of gods!
High fructose corn syrup tastes like shit, and it's in nearly everything we (Americans) eat... but it doesn't have to be. The Dr. Pepper bottling company that makes Dublin Dr. Pepper can't make enough to meet demand, and still the price of them is reasonable.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
No, it's not "poisonous", but your body doesn't handle it all that well if you get excessive amounts. Might even be so that together with other sugars (as in fruit) the body can handle it but not as good if it's ONLY fructose.
Well, that's not EXACTLY accurate, but close enough.
Different fruits have different mixtures of sugar. Peaches, for example, are primarily sucrose (plain old "table sugar") naturally as I recall.
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I posted in my old account a bit of a summary of how and why I changed my diet. I have to say going on three years now, it has worked out trememndously. I avoid white processed sugar, corn syrup, fructose, white processed flour and yeast and my health has never been better. It really is amazing how much you can change about your body with a few simple changes in your diet. Simple in terms of what they are but maybe hard in terms of habits and tastes. Still, it's 100% worth it.
HFCS is a pretty nasty substance and this has been known by a lot of us for quite some time. It's nice to see science proving us right. The only issue is that American culture is too stupid these days to pay attention to science (witness the evolution vs. ID debates). But nonetheless it's time to publish this kind of information far and wide. Corporate profits be damned! We're talking about human health here and that comes before ANY fucking worthless shareholder. So spread the word folks. Link to my old JE and get the health revolution rolling! Peace!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Probably helps that I've been practicing Tai Chi for years, but point is, it's not even difficult to find good food in mainstream areas. The problem is people are generally uneducated or completely undisciplined about placing their long-term health and well-being above the short-term return of "Oooooh, yummy num-nums!"
It's easier to blame lack of supply than it is to take responsibility for becoming educated about nutrition, eating correctly, and exercising regularly. Hence we have a ton of lardasses running around the U.S. On the other hand, there are a lot of beautiful fit healthy people, too. Which kind do you want to be? It's that simple.
Well I hate sweets and anything sweet and still am obese. There must be some greater reason ofr obesity, like not moving your butts.
I love pizzas and hate to go to the store and so launched http://www.gharpe.com/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 0CDC39/sr=1-8/qid=1135346118/ref=sr_1_8/104-703368 6-9256721?_encoding=UTF8&n=3580501&s=gourmet-food& v=glance
Just goes to prove that a fool and his money are soon parted.
According to Linus Pauling, fructose is the raw material from which cholesterol is synthesized in the body. Sugar (or sucrose) is half fructose and half glucose. According to Pauling, the places in the world where people eat a high-fat diet do not correlate at all with the population having high cholesterol. However, high sucrose consumption had a 100% correlation with the incidence of high cholesterol.
Now, back to my candy cane...