I remember a time in the 70s and 80s when I was just getting started in the field of nutrition when fructose was considered a harmless sweetener for diabetics. Marketed as “diabetic sugar,” fructose syrup was dispensed in clear plastic containers and consumed with impunity by persons with blood sugar problems.
The embrace of fructose as an alternative to glucose was fostered by the observation that it evoked a lower blood sugar response than other sweeteners. Fructose was found to have one of the lowest glycemic index (GI) values—20, as compared to glucose, and its disaccharide maltose—100 and 105 respectively.
One putative advantage of fructose was that it seemed to get “under the radar” of the body’s insulin responses. Fructose—unlike sucrose, glucose, malt sugars and starches—not requiring insulin for its metabolism, did not appear to stoke the insulin surges which could lead to insulin resistance, a pathway to metabolic syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes.
This led the American Diabetes Association to endorse fructose as a preferable alternative to other sugars from 1979 to 2001—albeit with a caution about high intakes.
All this changed in 2004 with the publication of a landmark review—one of the most frequently cited in nutrition literature—entitled “Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity.”
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It’s NOT just fructose that is the problem since 1971 a Japanese scientist changed the molecular structure of corn syrup which created HFCS, a chemical sweetener. High Fructose Corn Syrup is addictive! Changes your metabolism and Brain function. 46 yrs later we have an obesity INDUSTRY that caters to the need for more health care, surgeries, bigger clothes, larger chairs, and propaganda that is anti-body shaming, “I love my body” fat and all the problems with it….while the commercial food industry laughs all the way to the bank on YOUR poor suffering health! WHEN? in the history of humanity have WE ever had 600 to 1,000 pound people? BEWARE! READ LABELS eat healthy it’s the best revenge…peace
The problem with both this review and the article that raised the original alarm about “fructose” is that they do no distinguish between natural forms and the man-made version–the High Fructose Corn Syrup that is extracted with solvents from corn. Those solvents include foreign chemical elements that interfere with the body’s internal chemisty. They might go under the radar in a slice of bread tested by the USDA, but when you add up all the foods we eat in a day, a week, a month, a year, those foreign elements accumulate and have a cumulative effect on the body that might well lead to obesity. Most fat cells that supply energy lie in the hypodermis and that is precisely where all nutrients we get in our diet travel. The non-biological elements can irritate nerves, compete for cell receptors, and grab micronutrients that all cells need, or interfere with transport across cell membranes. Obesity may result from production of new fat cells because the liver orders these when it detects the lack of metabolites or abiltiy to be stored inn the hypodermal fat cells.
The same problem may lie with soy oil that has been invading almost everything we eat now, as it has replaced canola, and other oils. The USDA tests the final product, it does not test all of the ingredients that went into making the final product at the processing plant. That plant may have gotten its soy oil from China, which is notorious for lack of oversight at processing plants (e.g. melamine contamination of pet food) and is not within the testing schema of the USDA. But there may be contamination by rare earth metals, which have a far more insidious effect on our body chemistry (e.g. lanthanum). China is the number one producer of rare earth metals and the worst air pollution in cities and probably also in the rural areas where agriculture and mining occur. Rare earth metals may contaminate soy beans, which are also very notable for their ability to grab pollutants, and are used for that purpose today in many industries.