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Comment by poelzi | Hacker News Reader

It is very important to distinguish between fructose and glucose sugars. Fructose is actually much more poisonous then glucose is. It seems metabolized mostly like alcohol. Now, with the high fructose corn syrup everywhere, makes the situation not better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

EDIT: fructose is not so problematic if it's still embedded in fibers like in fruit. Bacteria then eat most of it, before it is absorbed.

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Yeah, the language mix-up is making it hard to tell people. We "know" that the brain eats sugar and that sugar is a simple form of energy. Unfortunately this applies to glucose specifically, not to any sugar-class molecule and not to the white crystalline powder called table sugar. Glucose is ok for you. Practically every tissue in your body can use it right away. Fructose is, as you said, metabolised in the liver, and is practically toxic. Table sugar and HFCS are both 50-50 fructose-glucose and biologically equivalent.

Table sugar is sucrose, which is a molecular combination of fructose and glucose.

HFCS is, as I understand it, just a bunch of fructose and glucose mixed together.

Does that make them biologically equivalent? I've always been curious about that. I recall reading a claim that the body's need to split the sucrose molecule makes it lower impact than if it were pre-split.

Many producers' batches of HFCS used to be contaminated with mercury [1]. Thanks to the efforts of a lone FDA whistleblower, industry no longer uses mercury to make this substance. But high fructose corn syrup may still be contaminated with starch - chains of glucose - thereby giving HFCS a much higher calorie count than is on the label.

Sugar is fine if your liver is healthy. It keeps me from wasting away.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...

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