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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."
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 used to work at a corn syrup factory.
all corn syrup is not fructose - in fact it's converted to fructose.
corn starch can be converted into many different forms of sugar. dextrose, maltodextrose etc.... heck we can make ethanol with it (yum).
it's converted into fructose because customers want fructose.
fructose in mass quanties may indeed not be good for you (fructose occurs naturally in honey, beets (i think) and probably in other places). i wonder if this is true of other sugars (sucrose, dextrose, etc...)
anyway point is corn syrup != fructose
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As a skinny American who goes out of his way to watch what crap he eats, let me just say, it's not at all easy. The VAST MAJORITY of food in the grocery stores here is unfit for human consumption, and the labeling of this food is often intentionally deceptive. The goal of labels is not to inform consumers, it is to sell products, and the only agency responsible for regulating this, the FDA, is in the pocket of the food companies and rarely even enforces its own policies.
Since the actual content of food here is so non-obvious, it takes a huge amount of awareness, ingredient reading, and careful research about the contents of each common ingredient, just to monitor what toxins go into ones diet here. It's nowhere near as easy as just not going to McDonalds, when the vast majority of foods in the grocery stores are of identical content. This situation has grown progressively worse, starting around the 50s, scaling up in the 70s, and then skyrocketing in the last 10-20 years.