More about harmful effects of high amounts of fructose in the diet
Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, has been a pioneer in decoding sugar metabolism. His work has highlighted some major differences in how different sugars are broken down and used:
- After eating fructose, 100 percent of the metabolic burden rests on your liver. But with glucose, your liver has to break down only 20 percent.
- Every cell in your body, including your brain, utilizes glucose. Therefore, much of it is “burned up” immediately after you consume it. By contrast, fructose is turned into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat.
- The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Insulin resistance progresses to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
- Fructose is the most lipophilic carbohydrate. In other words, fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn FFAs into triglycerides. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this.
- When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat!
- The metabolism of fructose by your liver creates a long list of waste products and toxins, including a large amount of uric acid, which drives up blood pressure and causes gout.
- Glucose suppresses the hunger hormone ghrelin and stimulates leptin, which suppresses your appetite. Fructose has no effect on ghrelin and interferes with your brain’s communication with leptin, resulting in overeating.
So please do not get caught up in the common mainstream thinking that eating fat is what causes you to get fat. Much more so, it is eating an excess of simple carbs, including fructose, that will lead to a cascade of disastrous metabolic effects in your body.
The bottom line is: fructose leads to increased belly fat, insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome — not to mention the long list of chronic diseases that directly result.
If you want further confirmation, check out this study published in the Journal of Nutrition last year. Researchers found that fructose turned into body fat much more quickly than glucose, and that having it for breakfast changed how the body handled fats at lunch.
Said Dr. Elizabeth Parks, associate professor of clinical nutrition at UT Southwestern Medical Center and lead author of the study in Science Daily:
“Our study shows for the first time the surprising speed with which humans make body fat from fructose … Once you start the process of fat synthesis from fructose, it’s hard to slow it down … It’s basically sneaking into the rock concert through the fence. It’s a less-controlled movement of fructose through these pathways that causes it to contribute to greater triglyceride [i.e. fat] synthesis.”
Ironically, the very products that most people rely on to lose weight — low-fat diet foods — are often those that contain the most fructose! Even “natural” diet foods often contain fructose as a sweetener.
See more on this topic and many thanks to: Dr Robert Lustig, Dr Elizabeth Parks, Dr Mercola at Mercola.com, Journal of Nutrition, Science Daily.
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Jan 3, 2010
Watch this series and realize the truth about sugars in our diet.
