Can someone explain to me how this doesn't imply that I should completely remove fructose from the list of ingredients in food I am willing to consume?
Table sugar is entirely made up of sucrose. A polymer which is composed of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule. Fructose is also in most fruit sugars. Honey is one of the worst offenders from a natural source. Finally corn syrup is the absolute worst.
Avoiding refined sugars in general is a good thing, but removing fructose completely would require not eating any fruits or berries either. The rule of thumb is that whole fruits and berries are okay if you get the plant fiber along with the juice and don't eat too many. Fruit juice drinks and refined sugars should be avoided for sure. Especially corn syrup, honey, and maple syrup.
Right now I only use refined sugar to feed yeast in baking breads. Even then, it doesn't take much. I don't drink fruit juice and only occasionally eat whole fruit as a treat. That seems to work okay so far for me, so take it as you will.
I eat a lot of honey, and am a huge fan of maple syrup. I love maple syrup, but I eat it in moderation. I eat it in smaller portions of about half cup daily but can have as much as I want. It's good on it's own as an energy source, and can be used as a natural sweetener. Also, I like to eat my whole grain breads with maple syrup as well. It adds flavor to them, so maybe I should add some! It's easy to eat, and is easy to make with an electric mixer, and it tastes great. So for me that's a win.
That is a lot of pure carbs and no protein or fat. All of your comments seem to be suggesting this diet. "Whole grain" is the only healthy part of your comment.
Honey in small quantities is probably just fine like table sugar or maple syrup. But keep in mind that it's 4:3 ratio of fructose to glucose. In addition is has a ton of minerals and organic compounds thought to be beneficial. But if you drink it in your tea every day you will be taking in a lot of fructose.
The thing with honey is that it is rare and seasonal in nature. Once a month/season/year is probably highly beneficial, daily is likely to be a slow suicide.
My point is availability doesn’t follow. That it has a functionally infinite shelf life means that the seasonality of production is not relevant. I can go to my big box grocery store and buy several honeys that are produced within 50 miles of my Midwestern city. I can buy several more that are produced elsewhere. Year round.
I don't know what else to add. You've gone too far off the path. It's pretty simple what OP wrote. Makes a person think about nature, evolution, adaption, is-this-healthy. Ok?
You know what it makes me think? You're chasing extremely marginal gains in life expectancy.
Yes, there's a good chance that in the caveman days I would only have had honey in rare circumstance when I found a good beehive and had time to process it. It would have been consumed fairly quickly unless I had extremely advanced levels of time preference and self control.
I also would probably have been dead by my mid-30s.
Now, I can get high quality, delicious, dark local honey - a year's supply at a tablespoon a day, more than you need - for less than what the average HN poster makes in an hour.
I don't eat that much of it, usually just use it as a maple syrup substitute for a nice weekend breakfast, and should be able to live until my 80s as long as I keep in shape with some basic exercise on a regular basis.
> You've gone too far off the path.
What path, friend? Where is the path? Where are the markings, and who put them there?
A person says, "honey seems like a rare seasonal treat in nature for most humans. Should we be eating a lot of it?". Same question gets asked about soy, gluten, beef, etc. It's more of a nutrition observation. It just seems like you missed the whole spirit of the thought.
I don't know what else to add. You've gone too far off the path. It's pretty simple what OP wrote. Makes a person think about nature, evolution, adaption, is-this-healthy. Ok?
I think most Americans are doing just fine with high fructose diets. However, there have been a lot of studies coming out, that seem to be suggesting there is some danger of obesity after a certain low carbohydrate diet or skipping carbohydrates altogether, as these diets tend to spike blood sugar rapidly. The most interesting is a study in humans, that showed a significant increase in blood glucose when carbohydrates were restricted . However, the more I look at it the more I feel like the results are definitely not true for me. I still get a pretty nice feeling in my mouth after eating sugar but I don't notice much of a difference in taste, taste just seems dull, bland, sour, and nothing much else, other than I don't feel I need as many carbohydrates as I did before.
Well, they're prepared for a famine, and since you can live till your late 60s or later while being horrendously out of shape, "fine" is a relative thing, no?
How in the world would eating less carbs lead to an increase in blood sugar? You must have something backwards. Eating more protein and fat instead of carbs should certainly lead to a decrease in blood sugar.
Yup! So enjoy them! They are one of my favorite treats. If you don't crush them and only drink the juice and you should be fine. Also don't eat more than 2 cups in a single sitting or drench them in sugar and you should be fine. They are also great with heavy whipping cream.
In addition to your comment, Sugar/Sucrose can be processed by your entire body. Fructose can only be processed by your liver. Consuming too much Fructose (easy to do), is not a good thing for your Liver.
Sugar is a bonded pair of fructose and glucose. In the stomach an enzyme breaks the bond and both sugars are absorbed. Glucose can be used by any cell but fructose is processed by the liver. It seems that fructose is what is disturbing blood and metabolism.
I actually watched an interesting video on this last night by Adam Ragusea, who hosts a cooking channel and likes to dabble in the food science side of things on occasion - https://youtu.be/DEKrfvgPGDY
It looks to be the case that in the case of HFCS high ratios of Fructose to Glucose can cause issues because of excess free Fructose.
If the balance between the two is maintained, things may be less problematic.
HFCS is a misnomer. It's just 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Whereas sucrose is exactly 50% fructose and 50% glucose. HFCS is a health problem, but not not more so than sugar already.
Balancing free fructose does not matter because by eating starch, you are already intaking much more glucose than fructose.
High-fructose corn syrup is not a misnomer. It is in contrast to ordinary corn syrup which consists almost entirely of glucose along with smaller amounts its oligo-saccharides (e.g. maltose, etc). Corn syrup generally contains no fructose.
To be precise, HFCS-55 is 55% fructose. Commonly used varieties of HFCS include HFCS-42, HFCS-55, and HFCS-90, containing the percentages of fructose indicated by the number, though HFCS-55 is the most commonly used form due to its near-equivalency in sweetness to sucrose.
The amount of free fructose should not be dismissed so readily, as starch requires breakdown into glucose via amylase enzymes, thus "flattening the curve" of its concentration in the blood. Free fructose is rapidly absorbed and the resultant relatively high concentrations induce specific negative effects in the body:
"The activity of fructokinase (KHK) is different from the other hexokinases by virtue of the fact that it induces transient ATP depletion in the cell. The mechanism is due to the fact that fructokinase (KHK) rapidly phosphorylates fructose to fructose-1-phosphate resulting in marked ATP depletion. The activity of fructokinase (KHK) is not subject to feed-back inhibition such as is the case for glucose metabolism, thus the ATP depletion is profound. Since the majority of fructose metabolism occurs in the liver, the effects of this ATP depletion are exerted on numerous important hepatic metabolic processes." (https://themedicalbiochemistrypage.org/fructose-metabolism/)
Furthermore:
"In contrast to the anorexigenic effect of hypothalamic glucose metabolism, the metabolism of fructose in the brain exerts an orexigenic effect. ... Since hypothalamic fructose metabolism bypasses this important regulatory step its metabolism rapidly depletes ATP in the hypothalamus. ... Therefore, although glucose and fructose utilize the same signaling pathway to control food intake they act in an inverse manner and have reciprocal effects on the level of hypothalamic malonyl-CoA." (ibid.)
Which is to say, free fructose promotes hunger while starch/glucose metabolism stimulates satiety.
I think you missed the point, moreover the article you cited actually supports the parent comment (note the italicized sentences).
> However, diets containing large amounts of sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, or fructose alone, overwhelm the ability of the small intestine to metabolize it all and under these conditions a significant amount of fructose is then metabolized by the liver and to a lesser extent by other organs such as skeletal muscle. It should be pointed out that the difference between the amount of fructose available from sucrose obtained from cane or beet sugars is not significantly less than that from corn syrup. Corn syrup is somewhat improperly identified as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) giving the impression that it contains a large amount of fructose. However, whereas the fructose content of sucrose is 50% (since it is a pure disaccharide of only glucose and fructose), the content in HFCS is only 55% and in many cases is actually only 40-45% fructose. The reason that corn syrup (which is all glucose to begin with) is labeled as HFCS is because the glucose extracted from corn starch is enzymatically treated to convert some of the glucose to fructose. This is done in order to make the sugar sweeter which is why it is particularly popular in the food industry. Therefore, any disorder and/or dysfunction (see below), attributed to the consumption of fructose, can be manifest whether one consumes cane or beet sugar, HFCS, or pure fructose such as in honey and most fruits.
I suppose that depends on what you believe the point is.
The opening assertion was that high-fructose corn syrup is a misnomer. This not a historically accurate statement. Disregarding any erroneous conflation of high-fructose corn syrup with corn syrup (of the only type that existed prior to the invention of what is termed high-fructose corn syrup), high-fructose corn syrup is most assuredly "high" in that it contains a "high" percentage of fructose (40-90%) in comparison with the previously existing corn syrup which contain 0% fructose.
It is spurious to hold to a vague definition of "high" that can only apply to concentrations somewhere in excess of 90%, lest we find ourselves unable to refer to water containing 0.5% lead by weight as having "high" levels of lead.
That said, I concur with the assertion that significant consumption of fructose in any of the commonly available forms, including as a component of sucrose, that do not substantially moderate the rate of its absorption (e.g. such as a dietary fiber-based structural matrix) carry an associated negative health risk.
It is accurate to say that sucrose becomes the equivalent of "HFCS-50" upon contact with the enzymes which line the inside of the small intestine.
As someone with IBS, Fructose in excess of Glucose is THE issue.
The FODMAP diet (peer reviewed, currently the gold standard for IBS diets) is about reducing the fructose-in-excess-ofglucose. Only a teaspoon honey at time, but you can eat maple syrup. Greatly reduced consumption of stone fruits.
Its known that some IBS cases are caused when someone does not breakdown fructose in their small intestine, so the fructose then ferments in the large intestine. You want some fermentation in your gut, but not too much!
It doesn't really have anything to do with food.
To learn more about this study see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15571466
Cognitive Benefits of a High Fructose Diet: I find that a diet high in simple sugars is beneficial in several aspects for cognitive performance, especially when compared to a standard diet. For example, one of the largest studies ever found that a high fructose diet was associated with an enhanced cognitive performance of young women. So, I recommend the high fructose diet to any young women who have mild to moderate cognitive problems but want to improve their memory. You can find more information here: http://cognitive.ucsd.edu/m/mzwg/cognitive-performance.html
