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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't the increased nutrient absorption offset by decreased appetite and intake? Is there something special about fructose on the demand side as well as the supply side, somehow suppressing normal energy homeostasis?

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Because evolution doesn't work to produce good solutions, just good enough ones. For example, your body works out it is in a low oxygen environment by sensing an elevated amount of carbon dioxide, not measuring oxygen levels. As such, it feels painful when you hold your breath, but going into a room with only nitrogen won't make you feel anything, except maybe breathe faster.

Your body is going to absorb the nutrients one way or another. High fructose doses are changing how those nutrients are absorbed in ways that aren’t beneficial. You don’t want a rapid spike of fructose absorption pumping unprocessed fructose into your bloodstream, as they observed.

If you don't absorb things too fast, they reach and feed your gut microbes -- which need it. And, you need them.

I'm gonna guess because for most of history few people were able to get a massive amount of fructose at once and so there wasn't much evolutionary pressure to select for that.

A bit like an exception nobody thought about while designing the code and so never wrote a handler for.

Appetite is only loosely related to caloric intake.

To give an example, our bodies seem to almost completely ignore liquid calories from sugar.

That is why it is possible to consume a literal 1000 calorie frappuccino and not feel the slightest bit full.

Or compare eating your sugar via gummy bears and via sweet fruit. It's not the calories so much as the amount of roughly solid stuff.

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