I think most of us know that we need to avoid fructose, but I'm not sure everyone knows exactly why. Knowing the following facts makes it much easier to stop eating foods that contain fructose. I learned about fructose when I started Body Rx the first time and was shocked to discover how many foods contan it--even ketchup!
The following info on fructose is from Body Rx, by A. Scott Connelly, M.D.
"Fructose is the primary sweetener used in processed foods, and it's also used as a stabilizing agent in frozen food to prevent freezer burn.
Fructose is the Stealth bomber of sweeteners. it gets into your cells by coming in below the radar. It doesn't cause a sudden rise in blood sugar like table sugar, which is why it's considered safe enough for diabetics. The reality is, fructose is far more insidious been real sugar -- not just for diabetics, but for everyone. Eating fructose is like taking a giant fat pill! Scientists have discovered that fructose has an immediate and dangerous effect on your metabolism. It sets your metabolism in fact-storage mode and keeps it there.
Fructose is ubiquitous throughout the food supply. You will find it listed on food labels as a quote high-fructose corn syrup" or "natural fruit sweeteners." If you walk through the aisles of a supermarket and read the labels you're in for a shock. High fructose corn syrup is just about everywhere -- in cereals, breakfast bars, cookies, sweet beverages, salad dressings, energy bars, ice cream, candy bars, marinades, frozen entrees, desserts, and even many alleged health foods. As much as 16 percent of our daily calories come from fructose. Kids who live on sugary processed foods consume even more than that. At one time, fructose was touted as healthier for us that other forms of sugar." (You can still find fructose sold as a sugar substitute for weight loss.)
Although fructose does not cause an immediate spite and glucose and insulin levels, there is a compelling body of scientific evidence, dating back to the 1960s, that shows the less immediate the long-term damaging effects of fructose. Studies have shown that diet high in sucrose (table sugar) sees results in elevated blood levels of cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin, scored a small, and Eureka acid. When the same experiment was performed using pure fruit chose instead of sucrose, it was found that sucrose caused blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides distort nearly twice as high.
With regard to blood lipids, there is overwhelming evidence that fructose increases plasma triglycerides. Under some conditions, dietary fructose may cause increases in plasma cholesterol. In other words, fructose can increase the amount of fatty deposits in the blood, which in turn can increase the risk of developing insulin resistance, Syndrome-X, adult-onset diabetes, and heart disease.
Fructose can switch metabolism from the fat burning to fat storage mode by promoting the formation of long-chain fatty acids, which are resistant to oxidation. Remember the rules of nutrition partitioning -- what doesn't get oxidized (i.e., burned for fuel) gets stored in the body. Therefore, the more long-chain fatty acids you produce, the more fat you will have on your body.
A study conducted at the children's cardiovascular health center at Columbia-Presbyterian medical Center, examined the diets of 67 children between the ages of two and 10 who were being treated for high cholesterol. All the children were placed on a fat-restricted diet. A link was found between the intake of simple carbohydrates (sugar) and low HDL (high-density lipoprotein), the good cholesterol, which helps prevent heart disease. The more fructose they ate, the lower their level of good cholesterol.
Fructose can increase the amount of uric acid produced by the body, which may increase the risk of developing doubt, a common form of arthritis.
A high-sugar diet, particularly one laden with fruit chose, may actually make you look and feel old before your time. Both glucose and fructose can damage proteins in the body, resulting in the formation of what scientists call "advanced glycation end products" (or AGE products for short).AGE products not only cause noticeable damage, such as wrinkles and age spots, but in high amounts, AGE products can do internal harm to joints and vital organs, including the heart and eyes. Studies suggest that fructose is 10 times more likely than fructose or glucose to trigger the formation of AGE products.
A study conducted by USDA scientists found that fructose may also increase the risk of osteoporosis, the degenerative bone disease that makes the elderly more vulnerable to breaks and fractures. Scientists believe that fructose may disrupt the normal balance among magnesium, calcium, and phosphorus, minerals that are essential for the construction and maintenance of bone, particularly in the context of a low-magnesium diet.
Some people mistakenly believe that fruit is 100% fructose and that the above statements apply to it. Thank goodness that is not true!
"Fructose, also known as lead you lows, or fruit sugar, is found in small amounts in fruits and to a lesser extent in vegetables and in higher concentrations in juice. It is the sweetest of the various kinds of sugars, backspace. High-fructose corn syrup, which is identical to the fructose found in nature, is a chemically altered version of corn syrup.
I'm not suggesting that you stop eating fruits because they contain fructose. Despite their sweet taste, when you eat fruits, you actually get a tiny amount of pure fructose along with other good stuff, like water, fiber, and beneficial vital chemicals (disease disease-fighting substances), vitamins, and minerals. When you need a processed food product with fructose, you are getting a highly concentrated form of fructose minus all the beneficial ingredients found in fruits and vegetables."
Last edited by DiamondDeb; 06-29-2003 at 10:02 PM.
Thanks for posting that!! That is one thing I did learn by being on BRx......I avoid fructose like the plague, and sugar is a close second. It is in so much food - for instance, I was amazed that most breads found in the grocery store have HFCS high up on the ingredient list, especially wheat/wholegrain bread. They even put Sugar in things such as fast food french fries!!! Good reasons to make sure you read your ingredient list before buying anything.
Ilene - nope, sucralose is different, although related (you can tell by the ending - dextrose, sucrose, fructose, etc. etc.)
Robin - on french fries, I think you might be getting 'dextrose' confused with 'fructose'. A small amount of dextrose is used on frozen potatoes and other frozen products to keep them from sticking together and for preservation. A VERY commonly used preservative - you'd be hard pressed to find items on the shelves of your local supermarket that DON'T contain some dextrose.
IMO, it's not fructose in particular, but SUGAR in general that should be used in moderation. The main reason that there are so many food products out there with fructose as an ingredient is pretty simple - it's cheaper than traditional cane sugar. As you may or may not know, my father was a chemist in the food industry for over 40 years - I used to browse through the journals and stuff he brought home.
Traditional cane sugar is (or at least was up through the 70's) subject to tariffs and duties imposed by the US government. Most cane sugar is produced outside the US (I believe it's still Cuba's main export) and historically has been subject to wild price fluctuations. Until the 20th century, white sugar was regarded as a luxury item, to be used sparingly (actually, my father - who grew up in a poor farm family in the South - recalled that they rarely had sugar - rather, the family 'made do' much of the time with sorghum syrup, which is still a popular sweetener in some parts of the country today).
In fact, sugar price fluctuations almost killed the Pepsi-Cola Company in the early 20th century, and caused some pretty big financial shakeups for Coca-Cola - an example from the book "For God, Country and Coca-Cola" by Mark Pendergrast:
Quote:
...[In 1920] Howard Candler [son of the founder of the Coca-Cola Company, Asa Candler] committed a terrible purchasing blunder. Unable to obtain Cuban sugar at a reasonable quality or price, he ordered a gigantic shipment from Java at 20 cents a pound. During the summer, one of Cuba's sugar plantations broke ranks and offered to sell at a cut rate, triggering a steep drop from the artificially high price. By September, the price had fallen from its May high of 27 cents a pound to 15 cents, continuing to drift down below 9 cents in December.
Candler and other Company officials prayed that the boat from Java would be caught in a tropical storm and sunk, but it arrived as scheduled on December 15 with 4,100 tons of high-priced sugar, the largest single shipment of sweetner ever received in Georgia. One unsympathetic wag said that The Coca-Cola Company had a "terrible case of diabetes". While most other soft drinks lowered their prices, Coca-Cola bottlers could not, and they were blamed for what was beyond their control...
After years of research, Coca-Cola (along with most of the other soft-drink companies) started using HFCS as the main sweetener in 1980. Prior to that, the sweetener was either cane or beet sugar (beet sugar introduced in the 1930's).
So - why we see so many products containing HFCS? Simple - it comes down to $$. Corn is one of the main U.S. crops - if not THE main one - and thus, the main ingredient is pretty plentiful in comparision to traditional cane sugar. HFCS is also sweeter than regular sugar, so conceivably you would use less (however, America's sweet tooth is at the point where the consumer demands SWEETER products in general).
I'm not by any means defending the use of HFCS in products - merely stating that ANY sugar in high amounts is bad IMO. If there was a less expensive sweetener out there, the food companies would be using it. Additionally, IMO, the obesity epidemic can't be blamed on merely one product, but a number of factors.
Any American who has ever visited Europe can tell you how much thinner Europeans are than we. Any European who has recently arrived here will gladly regale you with stories about how stunningly fat he thinks we are.
No European country even comes close to us in terms of obesity. The average North American is more than 16 pounds heavier than the average Northern European. But gross obesity is where we really excel. We have almost three times as many grossly obese people as Sweden; four times as many as the Netherlands.
Yet by our standards they are doing everything wrong.
Low-fat and no-fat cookies, cakes and desserts are virtually nonexistent in Europe. You're more likely to find a statue of the Duke of Wellington in France than a Snackwell's cookie.
Europeans get almost no wonderful diet advice thrown at them, like we do – by the government and those wonderful women's magazines that regularly offer "the last diet you'll ever need." Only the U.K. provides food labels with fat and calorie content. Without our "solutions," Europeans are so much thinner than we. Why?
Our food portions look like something out of Jurassic Park.
Europeans have more appreciation for the quality of food, while to Americans, quantity has a quality all its own. Muffins are now five times or more their original size. Pastry shops sell doughnuts the size of plates, perhaps 10 times larger than the originals.
The original bottle of Coca-Cola held 6 ounces; now the standard bottle from a machine is 20 ounces and convenience stores sell 64-ounce sodas (containing more than 800 calories). Yet the typical European Coca-Cola bottle is about 8 ounces.
My favorite European candy bar comes in only one size, 20 grams. My favorite American candy bar's small size is three times bigger.
Europeans haven't been indoctrinated with the low-fat/no-fat nonsense. "The studies are clear," says Dr. Walter Willlett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It's a myth that it's just the fat in your diet that makes you fat. ... It doesn't make any difference where your calories come from."
We don't get nearly as much informal exercise.
If you see a jogger in Paris or Brussels, it's probably an American. Europeans are walkers; we are drivers and passengers. They have a great advantage in that things are much closer together in their cities. But Americans can easily work more informal exercise into their schedules, such as parking the car as far from the store entrance as possible and taking the stairs whenever possible instead of the elevator.
American food is systematically stripped of fiber.
The American diet seems to treat fiber (the indigestible part of fruits and vegetables) with more loathing than cockroaches. Europeans eat much more high-fiber (whole grain) bread, cereal, fruits and vegetables than we do. A recent survey found that most Americans who ate any whole-grain food at all ate less than a serving a day. More than half consumed no whole-grain cereals during the previous two weeks. A 1996 survey of shoppers found that for 80 percent, the first item they looked for on a label was fat content. Only 3 percent said fiber.
Yet, there is overwhelming evidence linking high fiber intake with slimness. For example, one study comparing the self-reported diets of lean and obese women found that the lean women's diet contained 45 percent more fiber than that of their obese counterparts. Another found that women given a small citrus and grain fiber supplement for three months lost about four and a half pounds more weight than the comparison women who didn't take the supplement. Over a year, that would be an 18-pound loss without cutting a single calorie or spending so much as five minutes on a treadmill.
We hide behind excuses.
Americans have built up an aura of inevitability, victimization and rationalization around obesity. Lat year's big excuse was, "I have the fat gene." Strange how the gene seems to manifest itself only on this side of the Atlantic.
This year's big excuse is, "I'm fat but I'm fit, and that's all that counts." Wrong. You may have good cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure levels, but all that fat takes an inevitable toll. Studies dating back literally a hundred years show clearly that the fatter you are, the shorter your life expectancy.
We are also largely institutionalizing obesity, with clothes catering to obese women on practically every street corner, popular magazines like People proclaiming on the cover, "Who Says Size Counts?" and the politically correct toiletry chain, The Body Shop, using an obese Barbie-type doll as a mascot. (Interestingly, The Body Shop stores in Europe do not use the doll.) The Mattel company has finally caved into demands and made Barbie herself fatter.
We're tied to the Tube.
Americans watch more than four hours of television a day on an average, more than twice the average European. This fattens us up by keeping us from doing calorie-burning activity and by bombarding us with tempting food commercials. This is especially true with younger Americans. Researchers reported in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association that "television viewing was the best single correlate" to children's fatness.
We're in too much of a hurry.
Europeans generally take life easier, with longer vacations and (more importantly here) longer meals. Americans seem to have a need to get our food fast and wolf it down even faster, turning what should be a sensual experience into a drag race.
When it comes to trying to get rid of excess flab, we can't wait for that either. The fat we put on over a period of decades we want to remove permanently in a few weeks. The urban landscape is dotted with signs promising "Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days!"
One of last year's biggest-selling diet books was The 5-Day Miracle Diet. Not quick enough for you? You should also buy The 4-Day Wonder Diet. Yet the slower you lose, the easier it is to stick to your regimen and the more likely you are to keep the pounds off.
Miracles come from God, not from diet book authors, weight-loss clinics or pharmaceutical companies. With 300,000 Americans a year dying of obesity, we need to get serious about our national weight problem. To be more slim, Americans must do when they want to be chic: Imitate the Europeans.
Thanks for the post, Karen! I always learn so much interesting information from you -- on so many topics.
I have to agree with Michael Fumento that there are many causes of the obesity epidemic in this country. If doctors and scientists could point the finger at any one thing, undoutedly Congress would ban it. But since it seems to be a constellation of interrelated products and behaviors, the solution is going to be a lot more complicated.
In the end, though, I think it may be as simple as "eat less, move more." But it's not what most people want to hear or do.
French Fries: Potatoes, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural flavor (beef source), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (to preserve natural color). Cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil and/or corn oil). TBHQ and citric acid added to help preserve freshness. Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an anti-foaming agent.
I'm not calling french fries a health food, but if you're buying pretty much any frozen food (including most frozen taters and veggies) then you're gonna get a dose of dextrose...but it is sprayed on in a VERY fine spray.
Hmm I wonder where I read that...oh well maybe I read it wrong
I do notice that some frozen fries do also have another lovely fat we should avoid - Partially Hydrogenated So I do read those ingredients carefully before buying.
Robin - oh yeah...unfortunately french fries aren't a health food (and personally speaking...McDonald's fries haven't tasted very good since around 1989 when they changed the shortening IMO!). Trans fats...there's another bad word. But then again, I wouldn't go to McD's expecting to eat 'healthy'.
Meg - wasn't it President Reagan who said ketchup is a vegetable?
Of course you can make healthy 'oven fries' at home...either out of regular taters or sweet taters. I used to do that all the time until I ran out of time!!!
Wowzers! French fries with ketchup -- TWO veggie servings! This "five a day" stuff is a piece of cake .... BTW, that piece of cake IS from the carb group at the base of the food pyramid, isn't it? It's OK as long as I have my Diet Coke with it to cancel out the calories, right?
Not sure WHY you should avoid Fructose?
more like 2 million cents!
So I do read those ingredients carefully before buying.
. Darn it -- here I was telling myself that they are just veggies 
