Sugar

I ran across a new alternative health newsletter a couple of days ago, the New England Health Advisory. It appears to have started up last month. They've published a brochure entitled The Truth About Sugar that was interesting to read. I'd seen most of the information before, mainly from Dr. Mercola's website and his 76 Ways Sugar Can Ruin Your Health.

The most interesting bit is a discussion of the differences between Glucose (including plain old table sugar or sucrose) and Fructose. Fructose is the sugar found in most fruit and in it's natural form, when eaten as a fruit, it's pretty much harmless, due to the fiber that slows down the digestion of the sugar. But straight fructose, as a processed food (derived from good old industrial agricultural corn), is a whole other deal.

It turns out that from every 120 calories of glucose consumed, on average, 1 calorie is stored as fat. But for every 120 calories of fructose consumed, on average, 40 calories is stored as fat! And significantly more of the fat is inter-abdominal fat, the worst possible kind.

It seems that fructose is metabolized very differently than glucose. Glucose is broken down in the body's cells, whereas most of fructose is broken down in the liver, much like ethanol (alcohol). And the way it stores the fat can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now the liver isn't one of our bi-lateral redundant organs (like our kidneys), meaning we have only one, so we can't do without it. So processed fructose should be nowhere in our diets, yet its in most processed foods!

An interesting sidenote is that by all accounts the obesity epidemic in America started in the late seventies. Just coincidentally this is when processed fructose, which is cheaper than sugar, started entering our food supply in significant ways. In particular, this is when most soft drinks changed from formulas based on sucrose to ones based on fructose (as High Fructose Corn Syrup).

Talk about a smoking gun...