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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but if anyone reading through could explain to me why adding fiber to fructose makes it "good" sugar I'd be really interested. I mean, I know that we need fruits and vegetables in our diets. I know that apples and carrots are good for me. I just don't understand why fructose without fiber is bad?

Right now... I just don't drink the soda or sugary drinks at all. But I don't really understand the science behind my decision.

Because I'm eating apples and carrots all the time ???

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Slower intake rate. Much like your liver can metabolize an oz of alcohol per hour in perpetuity (well, until liver cancer sets in) and you won't even get drunk, but trying to drink 100 oz all at once every 100 hours will promptly kill you. So the theory is slapping your blood and insulin system with the equivalent of 20 apples in a single impulse will mess with your insulin levels and fat storage rates much more than slowly sipping it in, by having chunks of apple take hours if not an entire day to digest.

Sipping a glass of apple juice over the course of an entire day would probably be healthier than slamming it in one gulp, however your dentist probably wouldn't approve. Speaking of dentists, scrubbing the flat surfaces of my teeth by grinding carrots for awhile in my mouth should lead to fewer dental issues than soaking my teeth's plaque layer in completely liquid acid and sugar.

There's also the fairly obvious issue that given the choice of 100 grams of apple fructose or 50 grams of fructose plus 50 grams of inactive fiber, obviously the raw fruit will provide fewer calories for a given subjective level of fullness. I know I'm eating junk food when I juice, but sometimes its fun and it certainly is tasty, and it never fails to amaze me how it takes half a bag of produce to generate a cup of juice. Most of the calories in that bag are in my cup of juice. A normal snack for me is a couple carrots, but I can turn five pounds of carrot calories into a (very large) cup and slam it.

Possibly your body can survive having the liquid sugar of 25 apples slammed into it instantly, every day. Certainly we never evolved to eat that way, so if we can handle it without sickness, its just good luck as opposed to evolutionary pressure. Our ancestors digested a lot of citrus very slowly one piece at a time, there was strong evolutionary pressure to thrive eating a piece of fruit per meal.

What people really mean here is that when you consume real fruit, you get fiber, vitamins, other micro nutrients and, yes, fructose. But the quantity of fructose you get is relatively small. When people drink fruit juice, basically all they are getting is the fructose (with water). And you're getting many apples worth at one time. This overloads the liver which starts turning the fructose into fat.

So eating an apple or an orange is fine. Drinking fruit juice is not. Hope this helps

Besides just making it hard to overdose on sugars it also slows down digestion to soften the blow, can even reduce amount absorbed at all.

More info https://intensivedietarymanagement.com/fibre-reduces-insulin...

The fibre in fruit allows a signal to stop eating to be sent to the brain. The fibre doesn't make the sugar good, but you will stop eating when you're sated and so consume less sugar. No such signal is sent when drinking sugary drinks, so it's more likely you will consume more sugar.

It's less a matter of making fructose into a good sugar, and more a matter of reducing the bioavailability of it. When you eat a piece of fruit, your body has to break it down in order to get at the fructose, and that takes enough time that you're now competing with your gut bacteria for access to that fructose. When you drink it in a soda, it's much easier to process and you have a significantly higher chance of absorbing it at soon at it enters your small intestine.

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