A Better Theory: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

I'd be sick from all the sugar with nothing to balance it out.

Yes, but you are missing one thing: fiberHow much fiber your food has is directly related to how fast the fructose is absobed into your bloodstream. So you want to eat foods high in fiber, especially when you're eating something with sugar.HFCS products like sodas and chips have no fiber in them, where as fruits, like an apple, has about 4.5g of fiber. This will make your body to not crave sugar as much, thus you consume less overall fructose in your diet. HFCS are absorbed very fast into the bloodstream so you're ready for your next treat sooner. Trips to the snack machine all day? Yes. When you eat carbs, or sugar, you're going to want to eat foods high in fiber - something not usually found in processed foods, and often not even in the ones that claim to have fiber like cereals or fiber bars. HFCS makes you want more sugar. As is the case, that the average American today gets 12% of their diet from fructose vs 4% in the early 1900's. The more fructose you consume the less healthy you'll be. The more energy you spend the more sugar you are burning. Yes, you will feel healthier. Also it realeases all kinds of nice mood enhancing chemicals that are very rewarding to the brain. That's why you "feel" better when you're active, especially in your youth I would imagine. Look, if I were you I'd change this opinion quickly and start looking at what you put into your body. It will work better that way for you - and you're not young anymore, it doesn't work the same. Also, the food industry has changed and the average diet has changed with it. You'd be surprised how much less fructose you ate as a kid, and also, how much more active you were. Both of those combined will make you quick lean and healthy.However, if your diet consists of high levels of HFCS it will lead to obesity. I would suggest cutting them out. This way you don't have to exercise as much in the later years.- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

I usually have fruits for breakfast with black coffee to balance it out.- Oni

It doesn't matter how much it has. What matters is how fast your body absorbes it, and how soon after that your brain is telling you to have more sugar.By having HFCS you can significantly increase the amount of sugar you consume on a daily basis. More sugar, more fatties, more fatties, more health risks, more heath risks more need for healthcare.If I was a conspiracy guy, I'd say the corn people are in bed with the healthcare people and try hard to produce "evidence" that HFCS is good for you so you eat it, get obese and depend more on healthcare. - Oni

Does that not depend on how much you have?And how does your body distinguish between a fructose molecule that came from an apple and one that came from a Pepsi? I don't think its the fructose, itself, but all the shit surrounding it. How significant? How does simply having HFCS allow for that? Its nothing personal, its just business

What matters is how much fiber it has.Like I wrote to Taq - getting your sugar from fruits, especially apples or pears that are high in fiber, reduces how fast fructose is absorbed into the bloodstream. This works for any carb also.Were as, if you're getting your sugar from a soda with no fiber, it is immediately absorbed into the bloodstream. So your body is ready for more sugar faster. Overall it has the affect of increasing the amount of fructose you'll have in your daily diet since your body will constantly demand sugar.If you have fruits your body will ask for sugary foods less. Works for carbs as well. Have carbs that are high in fiber, like beans instead of rice, and your body will crave less carbs overall in your daily diet. I knew it!- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything particularly bad about fructose. Nor do I think that there anything wrong with corn syrup that has its fructose levels increase from 50% all the way up to 55%.As I said, its all the shit around it that matters. Out of curiosity, how does fiber affect the fructose absorption rate?

Well it is important to have fructose for energy. But if you have too much, and you're not active for example, it turns into fat cells and leads to fatties at the beach. Disgusting. Plus it leads to all kinds of health issues later in life. So long as you moderate it, and have smart fructose like fruits instead of soda, should be ok - unless of course you're diabetic, then it can be an issue. The presence of fiber will slow down your digestion because there's more things your stomach needs to breakdown. So by just the way your digestion system functions fructose will be absorbed slowly in a longer period of time.The presence of no fiber allows the fuctose to be absobed immediately without any steps in between you eating it and the liver absobing it.- Oni

I think both Onifre and I agree with the point you're making, that a fructose molecule is a fructose molecule is a fructose molecule. The origin doesn't matter.Push with fifty pounds of force on a brick wall for a hundred seconds and nothing will happen, but push with 5000 pounds of force for one second and you might get somewhere. The hypothesis we're advocating in this discussion about fructose is that it's the same with some biochemical processes, that fructose molecules delivered rapidly to the bloodstream have a significantly larger effect out of proportion to the same amount of fructose delivered slowly. Ten grams of fructose delivered to the bloodstream in just ten minutes will have a much bigger impact than when delivered over a period of an hour or so.I may disagree with Onifre somewhat on the interaction between fiber and fructose. I believe that fructose intimately integrated into the fiber of an apple because they grew together is experienced substantially differently by the human digestion system than just the combination of 6 grams of fructose, 2 grams of glucose and 4 grams of fiber. The hypothesis is that real food is more than just the sum of its parts. This hypothesis has a substantial chance of being true because, as nutrition science keeps discovering, food has components we don't understand yet or even know about.--Percy

The problem with the human machine is that it gets its fuel and parts from the same source. It's like your car trying to make new spark plugs out of gasoline. Things like fructose work well as fuel but they overload the parts-making equipment.If we were to eat like, say, Cro-Magnon man (assuming that our digestive systems haven't evolved much since then) we might be "healthy" in a parts-oriented sense but we'd have trouble getting enough fuel.The source of the problem is agriculture. Without it, we'd be healthy but dead.

Do you disagree that fiber slows down the absorption of other nutrients found in the same food? Because I think that's a lot of what fiber does. Obviously fructose would fall into one of those nutrients being absorbed slowly, is how I understand it. I wanted ask this earlier when you mentioned Omega-3's and our new found knowledge of how much we need it - lots of wild salmon, guys!Maybe some of the older folk here can help, what oil did they give spoonfuls of to kids and why did they do that?- OniEdited by onifre, : No reason given.

Research suggests otherwise. I know the 5% increase (which means a 10% difference between fructose and glucose levels) seems tiny, but animal research indicates that HFCS causes substantially greater weight gain than sugar when caloric intake is held constant, for example, A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain.Concerning people, while correlation doesn't prove causation, studies indicate that the obesity epidemic is coincident with increasing use of HFCS in food, for example, Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity.The food and beverage industry has successfully painted a picture of controversy concerning the dangers of HFCS, but many are of the opinion (and I share this opinion) that this is just the "no evidence that tobacco is dangerous to health" stonewalling and denial game all over again.--Percy

We absolutely agree about the role of fiber. But, sticking with the apple example, I think fructose and glucose in the original apple matrix play out in the human body much differently than just the same amounts of fructose, glucose and fiber taken by teaspoon.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Thanks for the links. Out of curiosity, do you know how much HFCS they were eating? Was it, like, 20 cans of Coke a day, or something? Or was it a fairly reasonable amount?

Well that all makes sense and I don't have any disagreement or argument.