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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I buy into the counter theory that high fructose corn syrup is killing us all and that arteriosclerosis is one of its manifestations. I think some people are even trying to blame it for osteoporosis. Something to do with blood pH and bones dumping calcium to buffer it.

Bullshit or not, my life does seem to be better without cheap soda in it. I drink fancy soda as a treat, instead of being on a hedonic treadmill of several a day. Every time I quit soda in my 20’s and early 30’s I lost 10 lbs. Eventually it stuck.

The advent of Kombucha changed that landscape quite a bit. Now I have a beverage that’s < 100 calories and I can’t chug.

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Do you have evidence for this theory?

Researchers link high LDL cholesterol to things like saturated fat and dietary cholesterol. Arteriosclerosis has been linked to LDL cholesterol, too. Dietitians, doctors, and health programs have done diet altering programs with people to lower the intake of these and see LDL cholesterol drop.

Numerous papers are linked here and can be found in search.

Do you have evidence for your view? Papers on it?

Update: Note, I'm not suggesting high fructose is good. We digest fructose differently when it's by itself compared to when it's part of the fruit/fiber it comes from. Eating fructose in fruit with all the parts is healthy.

Dietary cholesterol has little relationship to blood lipid levels.

https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13061935

The paper itself is interesting. By in large the study consisted of people who already had high cholesterol (to the level their doctor would likely recommend putting them on a statin) and eat above the recommended level (from the american heart association) of saturated fat and a fair amount of dietary cholesterol.

They don't appear to say how they deal controlling for other factors that raise ones cholesterol.

Reading through the paper I find it hard to see signal among so much noise. And, it looks like the data shows the more people increased dietary cholesterol the more their cholesterol levels increased.

It makes me wonder how they draw their conclusions. Reading the paper and looking at their data doesn't give me confidence in their conclusions.

No papers to link. Anecdata of n=1.

My cholesterol levels were always very high. Even with statins. They helped but less than doctors wanted and they kept increasing even when increasing statin dose to the max. I craved lots of sugary stuff too. Cut out fat, didn't eat any eggs except what's hidden in the sugar stuff etc.

Then one year I decided to do Keto. Levels were still elevated but multiple points lower than before. Actual <20g carbs Keto. Quite a bit on the carnivorous side too.

I'm back to a 'normal' diet but this time I am not cutting out fats. In fact I'm eating lots of healthy fats (that were previously and maybe still are marked as "bad") such as eggs and butter and cream. I also eat carbs again, though I try for less sugary stuff. Cholesterol levels are slightly up again.

My conclusion: Carbs (overall) are the bad guy.

My doctor told me (again I have no papers to link) that the most up-to-date science nowadays seems to suggest that carbs, especially refined carbs, cause inflammation and calcium deposits in arteries which the body tries to "repair" (overlay) with cholesterol (that's its job). Problem is if it keeps doing that up to the point where it blocks. But cholesterol isn't the bad guy basically. It's just doing its job and if you don't eat the cholesterol, the body makes it by itself so that it has it available to do its job.

There is one thing worst than fructose: fat + fructose.

There was a study where some kids with fatty liver replaced most fructose with glucose and the liver fat was severely decreased.

Fructose + fat seems to be the most destructive thing in practice.

You're talking about pie. Pie is poison. Apple pie, cherry pie, peach pie. Home-made by grandma with her own wrinkly hands. Poison.

That's a hard pill to swallow.

These pies are a new invention.

Humanity has never eaten so much carbs + fats at the same time as we do now.

The fact that your dear grandma makes it does not make it less poisonus.

Even our grandparents eat totaly different foods nowadays then people 200 years ago do, so even though grandma is old compared to us, she is still a very young compared to human evolution and our dietary changes.

maybe not the combination but fat is very essential in early human diets so it stands to reason we are pretty fucking good at processing them (barring the frankenfoods produced by hydrogenated fats). We never encountered the quantities of sugar that we encounter now in foods now however. They took out the fat and put in sugar to keep it taste in man-made concoctions like "low fat ___________"

Wasn't grandma using cane sugar?

Ya but the fruit is full of fructose.

Nobody was fat when grannie was a little bit younger and ate her own pies, litteraly nobody.

That was all the smoking and lack of micro plastics

When you read US novels about 1920s and 1930s, there are actually fat characters in them.

The meaning of ”fat” is also very different from the contemporary.

Historically and for most people, pies were baked as a way to stretch foodstuffs. "Sugars" were added to make meat and other ingredients that turn sooner more palatable. Lots of baking before refrigeration was done with an eye toward food preservation.

Sugar as a fungible and fiber-free isolated ingredient made dessert baking more economical and of course we love sugar naturally so demand skyrocketed. The Caribbean slave trade and the decades of indentured servitude that followed was really pushed by new high demand for sugars. Pies got sweeter and more decadent. People aren't today baking turtle or rabbit into their pies with a few dried apples for flavor. They're wrapping syrupy fruit in fat and flour -- or in some cases just making pies with sugar fluff alone.

Grandma herself is generations removed from the original rationale for pie and we're even more so. You're right, pie is a blight today despite being oh-so-nostalgic. You don't need to seek out something so obviously sickly sweet as grandma's cherry pie to find issue though. Pasta sauce, bread and even processed meat contain far more sugar than at any time in history. Fruits and vegetables are even sweeter due to our crop selection and our meat contains more fat per gram of protein because of our farming methodology.

Just by eating an ordinary American lunch today, we probably take in in something more nutritionally similar to our former generation's special weekly indulgence than their evening meal; literal pie is just the cherry on top.

You forget one thing: outside of US, people don't put HFCS into everything like there's no tomorrow. We use sugar proper across the pond, and while it's a poison, it's not to the extent fructose is.

There are at least 56 different names for sugar on food labels in the USA

Table sugar is also high fructose. Sugar is also called sucrose, it is 50% fructose and 50% glucose.

High fructose corn syrup is "available at various fructose levels. HFCS 42, used in beverages, processed foods, cereals and baked goods, comprises 42 % fructose and 53 % glucose. HFCS 90 comprises 90 % fructose and 10 % glucose... HFCS 55, which is used in soft drinks."

-https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983097/#:~:tex....

I think sucrose tastes better but it seems to be processed in the body the same way as corn syrup.

Btw, fruit juice or honey are also high in fructose. Most likely they are all equally bad. All stored in the liver and all build insulin resistance.

Sucrose is mostly not processed like fructose. Fructose is processed in the liver, sucrose mostly by the regular digestion tract, with a little bit in the liver. You should do more reading, it's pretty fascinating.

No this is just lore, there is a great deal of pseudo science around this. They are slightly different chemically so it's not impossible but there is no evidence to that effect.

Note also that Sucrose is 50% fructose, so saying sucrose isn't processed like fructose is very unlikely.

There is lots of speculation even in the mainstream, but our best understanding now is that they are similar.

This is a fallacy, HFCS is no worse than cane sugar. What is more important is the amount stuffed into food. HFCS has been demonized when it's sugar&hfcs that should be demonized. Human bodies can handle small amounts of sugar pretty well but when you increase that 10-100x like modern America diets then you get issues.

It’s time to put this tired myth to bed. The truth is that HFCS and table sugar are virtually identical, and the health effects of consuming either are the same.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/high-fructose-corn-syru...

If fructose is much more toxic than glucose then NO, they are NOT identical since it would depend on the ratio between fructose to glucose.

It would dependt on the concentration of fructose vs glucose in HFCS, so in theory HFCS might be diffren.

>> The 2 most important HFCS products of commerce contain 42% fructose (HFCS-42) and 55% fructose (HFCS-55). The remaining carbohydrates in HFCS are free glucose and minor amounts of bound glucose, predominantly maltose (di-glucose) and maltotriose (tri-glucose). Mention of HFCS with higher fructose content (ie, HFCS-80 or HFCS-90) is occasionally seen in the literature, but these products are highly specialized and are manufactured infrequently and in insignificant amounts.

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/88/6/1716S/4617107

Eg a potato and an apple might have the same amount of carbs, but since an apple has more fructose it's more toxic (assuming we only measure toxicty based on the glucose:fructose ratio).

It matters how quickly it is absorbed and the actual -amount- as usual. Apple has far less "energy" per volume than a potato. You can't just look at ratios obviously. all that glucose gets broken down into sucrose and fructose and that's the point. Being toxic is a function of both "chemical" and amount. a potato will have a much higher amount of fructose per unit that an apple after it all gets broken down, an apple also has fiber that will slow down the absorption of the glucose/fructose.The ratio of fructose/sucrose in standard issue is such that it should be slightly worse than cane sugar, but not that much worse.

What are you even talking about?

You mixed many words + potato has practicaly 0 fructose compared to an apple.

When a potato is eaten, the amylase in the saliva mixes with the potato starch and starts breaking it down into sugars, some wil be glucose acording to [1].

You can test this yourself by eating a plain cracker. A plain cracker doesn't contain any sugar, but if you keep chewing it you will notice a sweet taste in the mouth. This is from the sugars released by amylase.

There is no mention of fructose on the amylase wikipedia page. So maybe you are right.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amylase

I buy into both parent statements - table sugar and hfcs are basically the same AND hcfs is in absolutely everything and is bad for us

The point is that if HFCS was replaced with table sugar it would be 90% as bad and essentially the same in the grand scheme of things. This is why I cook 80% (approx) of my own food. I do eat out occassionally I suppose but most of my food comes from raw ingredients where I control what goes in. It's also far cheaper.

Your article took a surface look at the issue. Here is a study showing they are not identical.

Effects of high-fructose diets on central appetite signaling and cognitive function https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25988134/

Totally. I've moved my addiction from soda to La croix, and noticed a big difference.

Added sugar and saturated fats are both bad.

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