Hacker News Reader

Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

The fructose-glucose ratio of a lot of apples is almost 2:1. HFCS is usually 45-55% fructose. Watermelon has a similar ratio. Lots of fruits have a higher fructose to glucose ratio.

HFCS is called high-fructose not because its some incredibly high level of fructose compared to most everything else, its because compared to regular corn syrup it is high. Regular corn syrup is nearly 100% glucose, so a mixture of 45% or 55% fructose is extremely high in that context. Table sugar is 1:1 fructose/glucose, but we don't call it high-fructose table sugar.

View on HN

HFCS is available in ratios with up to 90% fructose. Granted, I don't know what the average is in the food industry. But like other commenters said, it's mostly about the absolute amount. You can't realistically eat enough apples to reach a fructose intake equivalent to that of a sugary drink. And even if you do, you also ate lots of fiber and other good nutrients.

Therefore, worrying about fruits because of fructose is unwarranted. Well unless you have fructose intolerance.

> Granted, I don't know what the average is in the food industry

The average is usually 45-55. By far the most common variety is HFCS-55.

I'm not disagreeing with the idea its easier to pound a lot of sugar drinking sweet beverages. I'm just disagreeing with the concept "fruits don't have much fructose" and people thinking HFCS means its generally way higher fructose content than other common sugars. An apple has more fructose than a serving of BWW Asian Zing sauce, as I pointed out in another comment. I'm not arguing wings are healthier than apples, I'm just pointing out the raw numbers of sugar. A cake made with sucrose will have a similar amount of fructose ratio as cake made with HFCS, assuming similar amounts of total sugar content.

Not a chemist here, so I'm wondering which is the higher energy state: fructose+glucose dissociated (into HFCS), or bound together into sucrose (white table sugar).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose

Why doesn't either HFCS want to crystallize into sucrose, or sucrose want to melt into 50% HFCS, given a bit of time, water, heat, or stirring?

I realize I never really answered your other question. Its tricky sticking the two sugars back together into sucrose, as heating it will generally carmelize it. After all, when you carmelize sucrose you're breaking that bond and oxidizing the glucose and fructose, so heating HFCS will ultimately yield the same thing in an oxygen environment. You'll generally need some kind of chemical process to link it together, it takes a bit of extra energy to join the two sugars back together.

Sucrose will hydrolize and break apart in water on its own, but it does take some time. Adding a little bit of acid will rapidly break it apart.

I don't doubt there's a lot of metabolic differences between sucrose and HFCS. Given they're free instead of bound I imagine it hits the body differently, and some studies do suggest this. Gastric acidity easily breaks the bond though, it rapidly converts to glucose and fructose in the gut. So I imagine most changes would be with our body's early detection in the eating process, such as the taste buds and other senses like that.

It's not the ratio that hurts you but the absolute dose you ingest.

They were probably talking ratio, not total amount.

> Most fruits are really not that high in fructose, compared to stuff like high-fructose corn syrup

An apple is going to have like 19g of sugar. So a little over 12g of fructose. A serving of Buffalo Wild Wings Asian Zing sauce (2tbs) has 19g of sugar. I don't know what variety of HFCS, so we'll assume HFCS 55. That's 10.45g fructose.

So an apple has more fructose (total) than a few buffalo wings with HFCS-based sauce.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com