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Does this not include sugar found in foods? Are those considered complex? Is eating natural sugar found in fruits as bad as eating refined/processed sugar?

• PieterH 10y ago
  There are many different kinds of sugars. It's worth understanding. Fructose is what harms you. Glucose is harmless. Sucrose is fructose plus a glucose. Lactose is harmless as long as you can digest it. Maltose is harmless. Etc. Fruits contain varying amounts of fructose. Wild berries, not so much. An apple or grape, rather a lot. Apple juice, considerably more.
  • rosstex 10y ago
    > Fructose is what harms you Can you provide more info on this?
    • ScottBurson 10y ago
      This is Robert Lustig's well-known talk on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
  • Normal_gaussian 10y ago
    It is very very hard to reach a harmful level of fructose when eating apples or other fruit. If consuming juices or concentrates it is very easy.
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    • PieterH 10y ago
      Orange flesh is about 3% fibre. 97% juice. There is no significant difference between eating an orange and drinking a small glass of juice, except the work involved. I don't think that changes "very easy" to "very very hard".
      • Jemmeh 10y ago
        Even time to chew it all is a big difference. It takes several oranges to make a glass of orange juice, which I can down in about a minute. It takes me quite a while to eat an entire orange. Since it also takes time for people to realize they're full, this also helps not to eat so much. Scooby's workshop, a very popular bodybuilding & fitness website covers this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAFdWifkt0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAFdWifkt0E
        • beachstartup 10y ago
          i stopped drinking oj when I moved to San Francisco and saw one of those novelty juicing machines with the orange hopper and exposed internals. it was like 6 or 7 oranges in a single glass! also made me realize why fresh oj is insanely expensive at restaurants.
      • nsenifty 10y ago
        Except, each orange only contains about 2 fl.oz of juice. What is significantly easier - drinking 16 fl. oz of juice or eating 8 oranges?
  • bad_user 10y ago
    This is reductionist thinking, the same kind of thinking that led to the low-fat fad, which unfortunately lasted decades. Fruits don't deliver just fructose, the also deliver nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants and fiber. As a consequence we digest fruits differently compared with processed sugar, as the absorption of fructose when eating fruits is slowed down. And our taste buds love sugar because our bodies crave for fruits, to fuel our big brains. We would have never developed this trait if naturally occurring sugar would harm us.
    • mixmastamyk 10y ago
      Remember though that modern fruits have been bred to be sweeter.
    • will_brown 10y ago
      >As a consequence we digest fruits differently compared with processed sugar, as the absorption of fructose when eating fruits is slowed down. When sugar is introduced to the body the liver begins to store/process the sugar. So it doesn't matter whether the sugar is from say coke (high fructose corn syrup) or an Apple. What happens when the liver can't store/process the amount of sugar you ingest is the body triggers insulin production, and while insulin production will be linked to obesity the insulin itself is the real harm to the body. Insulin triggers the bodies production of fat cells to store the sugars it can't process. Also, Insulin has the effect of enlarging the bodies cells (fat cells, cancer cells, etc...) this can lead to enlarged organs (liver disease, heart disease, etc...). There is something to be said that an Apple has nutritional value that the soda is lacking (plus fiber), and this can account for some people drinking multiple sodas a day (maybe even a 2 litter) but very unlikely to be eating 12 Apples a day; nevertheless, the underlying sugar is harmful vis-a-vis insulin spikes. The real difference is the person eating the apple instead of drinking the coke is likely to stop their sugar intake at 1 Apple and is more likely to incorporate some form of exercise. Personally, I go by a rule of thumb I try not to consume anything with more than 10g of sugar (a whole apple is almost double). >And our taste buds love sugar because our bodies crave for fruits, to fuel our big brains. We would have never developed this trait if naturally occurring sugar would harm us. Humans develop traits and cravings for things that have detrimental side-effects quite regularly. It used to be that Type 2 diabetes was called adult onset diabetes, in fact in the UK kids weren't diagnosed with Type 2 until the 2000's. Despite hundreds of billions a year spent managing Type 2, in most cases it can be completely prevented and even controlled to the point people can stop taking any medication through proper diet.
• vixen99 10y ago
  No difference between fructose in fruit and the fructose which the body splits from sucrose in refined sugar. Fruit sugar is fructose. It's reported that in some people a marked increase in blood pressure is associated with high fructose intake. That is certainly so in my case after eating more fruit than I should.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    That constitutes more than you should for you? Personally I stopped buying jumbo massive apples and now usually only eat the small ones they say are for kids. I usually only est fruit with other things like in a salad or in a bowl of yoghurt nuts and seeds (tahini too) and maybe with coconut oil. I think this combo slows digestion to smooth out the sugar absorption. I think it would be difficult to eat too much sugar from fruit in the same as from, say, soda just because it would be hard to eat that much fruit, but still possible to over do it. When I was studying nutrition one of my lecturers was fond of telling a story about one patient he saw who, when asked what he ate, just said "apples", lecturer asked "and?" and the guy says "oh no, just apples". The guy was eating like a bucket of apples a day and nothing else. That could cause some problems.
• Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  Sugar that occurs naturally in foods are often complex. Complex sugars are larger molecules that can be broken into simple sugars (lactose, fructose, glucose). There is actually very little sugar in fruit, and they are full of vitamins and minerals which are good for you. If you cut artificial (added sugar) foods from your diet you will likely find that other foods taste sweeter as your taste becomes more sensitive.
  • SonicSoul 10y ago
    > There is actually very little sugar in fruit that's incorrect. in fact drinking a glass of orange juice is similar to drinking a coke. just because its fructose does not mean it's any better for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
    • lowbloodsugar 10y ago
      Yes, let me go and pick a glass of orange juice from my glass of orange juice tree.
      • tbomb 10y ago
        I lol'd
      • SonicSoul 10y ago
        http://thepaleodiet.com/fruits-and-sugars/ http://thepaleodiet.com/fruits-and-sugars/ pretty far from little sugar.
    • ufo 10y ago
      That is largely because you need to squeeze more than one orange to get one glass of orange juice.
  • guelo 10y ago
    The word fructose comes from the word fruit, it literally means the sugar found in fruits. Most fruits have more fructose than other sugars. A banana has 14 grams of sugar, equivalent to 4 teaspoons of table sugar. If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it. You can argue that it's ok to eat fruit because it's balanced by the fiber and vitamins, but that's equivalent to saying that fructose is ok in moderation. Which seems to go against the current nutritional science understandings.
• deleted 10y ago
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• bunderbunder 10y ago
  "Natural", in this context, is a weasel word that's whose key uses include making people feel more comfortable about buying junk food, so that junk food manufacturers can sell more junk food. Chimpanzees, for example do eat a lot of fruit. I believe it's their primary source of calories. But the wild fruits that chimps eat are a very different beast from how humans in wealthier countries consume fruit. The fruits they typically eat haven't had their sugar content dramatically increased through centuries and millennia of selective breeding. They haven't been turned into juice, which removes all the fiber and essentially renders them a nutritional equivalent of Coca-Cola. They haven't been dried, which concentrates the sugar and increases the glycemic load. They haven't had extra sugar added as a ("natural"!) preservative in order to maximize the shelf life. etc. etc. All that aside, though, no, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any compelling evidence to indicate that your body can somehow tell whether the sugar in your food was produced in situ or extracted from some other plant and then added to what you're eating. To it, C12H22O11 is C12H22O11. There is some stuff suggesting that processing affects how much sugar is extracted by your digestive system, though. It's not able to break down the food and get at its contents quite as efficiently when the food hasn't been mechanically ground up or macerated first, and your teeth are unlikely to grind it up quite so finely. In a nutshell, sugar that's inside a plant's cells is going to be less available (and, to that extent, "have fewer calories") than sugar that's on the outside of the cells.
  • forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > All that aside, though, no, I'm pretty sure there hasn't been any compelling evidence to indicate that your body can somehow tell whether the sugar in your food was produced in situ or extracted from some other plant and then added to what you're eating. To clarify I wasn't saying that the difference was how the sucrose is produced, but the actual metabolic process it takes to obtain it. It takes significantly more time for the body to break down sugars which are bound with fibers, something like today's epidemic simply would not be possible solely with whole fruits.
  • ScottBurson 10y ago
    > To [your body], C12H22O11 is C12H22O11. Uh, careful. If you said "sucrose is sucrose" I would agree, but lactose and maltose also have that formula, and require different enzymes to digest.