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Comment by jsprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

>> Most of us don’t know that a serving of tomato sauce has more sugar than a serving of Oreo cookies

>Most store-bought jar sauce has sugar in it (and tastes gross). You can absolutely make sauce that doesn't have sugar in it, and some of the nicer jar sauces are that way also.

I don't think the article was necessarily talking about added-sugar sauce. It's not clear exactly how much a serving of tomato sauce is, but calorie for calorie tomato sauce (cooked tomato) does contain more sugar than Oreos.

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Comparing calorie-dense food like Oreos to tomato sauce seems a bit disingenuous. Especially when the sugar in tomatoes is regular fructose and provokes no insulin response.

Everything I've seen, including my own blood testing, shows that fructose increases your blood sugar response just as much as table sugar, thus provoking a similar insulin response. I've not seen any evidence that naturally occurring fructose is any better for you than added sugars.

The fructose-to-glucose ratio of a ripe tomato is about 1.25.

A few years ago, some studies came out finding that any fructose consumption may be harmful.

I'm probably behind the times but I haven't heard it said that any amount may be harmful. Even fructose's harshest critic, Dr. Lustig, says that fructose's harm comes when an large acute volume of it overloads the ideal metabolic pathway and results in the using metabolic pathways with harmful byproducts. This is why he says whole fruit consumption is generally ok. The fiber in the fruit slows down absorption and gives your liver time to process the fructose without resorting to the harmful fallback methods.

There may be a threshold response, but from what I remember, the threshold might be low. I wonder if much of the fiber in tomato is destroyed when reducing it to a sauce?

Cooking doesn't destroy fiber, it just softens it. As opposed to pulp-free fruit juice, from which all fiber is removed, and is unhealthy. Even if tomato sauce were the equivalent of fruit juice, you'd usually have it with pasta, bread, etc. which all have fiber as well.

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