12 ms·

That's the thing though. They may be 'found' in one place or another, but it seems that the surrounding chemicals matter quite a bit more than we thought.

• eptcyka 4y ago
  What surrounding chemicals? The mitigating factors in fruit is that the fructose is interspersed with plant matter that isn't pure sugar and occasionally the non-fructose plant matter contains other nutrients. The plant matter allows for slower absorption of fructose, thus blood glucose levels rise slower and the peak might be lower. However, there's nothing inately bad or good about the "surrounding" chemicals - if you eat too much fruit you'll have similar health consequences as if you were to consume similar amounts to high fructose corn syrup. Swap out fruit for fruit juice, the outcomes will be more similar still.
  • hedora 4y ago
    Fruit also contains glucose. Studies of HFCS suggest that the problems all come from lack of signaling. Your body doesn't "notice" the calories you obtained from the fructose, which causes all sorts of downstream issues. To see the effect for yourself: Go to a fast food restaurant, and get the largest sized cup that would normally have HFCS soda in it. Fill the cup with sugar based soda, and drink the entire thing at a normal rate. You'll likely feel full / nauseous before you get to the bottom of it. This doesn't happen (as soon) with HFCS soda.
    • aidenn0 4y ago
      HFCS has nearly the same balance of fructose/glucose as sucrose does. Since you mention soft-drinks, that uses HFCS 55, which means 55% of the sugar is fructose. Apple juice, by comparison is 60% fructose. Unless the claim is that it takes about 10% more sucrose based soda to fill you up (which would be lost in the noise were I to try it), I'm not sure your claim holds water.
      • KMag 4y ago
        Exactly. Lots HFCS is pretty bad for you. Lots of table sugar is also pretty bad for you. From the evidence I've seen, we should be railing against all quickly absorbed sugars, not specifically HFCS. Unfortunately, the naturistic fallacy is insanely common.
        • smegsicle 4y ago
          the naturalistic argument is very often on the right track in the complex, widely misunderstood science of diet sugar in nature is almost always paired with fiber, separating them makes the sugar much more harmful
          • KMag 4y ago
            The "rapidly absorbed" qualifier is an allusion to this. Fiber has several benefits, one being blunting the spike in blood sugar by slowing absorption. Some foods are healthiest when unprocessed (other than the minimal processing involved in harvesting and shipping), but bioavailability of nutrients in others is greatly improved by cooking and/or other processing. Certainly, the safety of most meats is greatly improved by cooking.
            • spion 4y ago
              The point of the naturalistic argument is actually a good one. We keep pretending we understand all the mechanisms and yet we get baffled over and over when we do enough processing and even though the ingredients are all still there it turns out there was one more thing we weren't aware of that completely changes how we react to the food.
              • smegsicle 4y ago
                trying to guess what vitamins or whatever are missing from a demonstrably deficient diet is not going to beat a known wholesome diet, even if your worldview for some reason contests the existence of a 'known' 'wholesome' diet it's hubris really