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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't say that - it says that glucose and fructose are handled differently (which is true; both occur from natural and processed sources) and that naturally-occurring sugars often come in high-fiber foods, and fiber impacts sugar uptake (which is also true). Sucrose is sucrose, whether naturally occurring or from processed sources.

The issue with "processed sugars" is that they appear in forms which cause you to not necessarily get enough fiber with them, and in form factors that are very easy to overconsume, but biochemically, 19g of table sugar and a couple of Benefiber caps are going to do approximately the same thing as an apple. Being processed doesn't make it magically toxic.

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I may be nit-picking here but I said that the impact of the 2 sources is different...because of fiber, etc. I didn't mean to imply that the sugars themselves were different.

Sorry, the way I read it was "the sugars have different impacts". Even if you didn't mean it that way, it is a common pseudosciency belief that "natural" and "unnatural" sugars are chemically different. So many people ignore that at the end of the day, the body is just making glucose out of the cabrohydrates you feed it.

Actually both are true, glucose and fructose have way different biochemical impact on the both. For starters, only 20% of glucose is metabolized by the liver, rest goes to muscles, brain etc. While fructose completely goes to the liver, since muscles and brain cannot make use of fructose directly. Another effect fructose has is that it sort of suppresses ghrelin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghrelin), the hunger hormone. So it is highly likely that you will not feel full when you have food with fructose. The advantage of having sugars (especially) fructose in fruits is that due to fibers you tend to feel full faster. Fiber also helps in ensuring that fructose is releases at a slower rate vs. a can of soda.

Different sugars are digested differently, but natural fructose in a fig is the same C6H12O6 that's in a processed fructose source like HFCS.

People like to talk about "processed" sugars like it's the sugar itself that has transformed, when really the problem with processed sugars is that it's just the sugar, and it's too easy to consume too much of it.

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