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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

The problem with refined fructose is that it contributes to you eating more because the liver cannot process it properly and does not send the "i am full" signals to the brain. Thus, it is in fact the reason why people have higher net caloric intake.

US style food is being exported all over the world. Sodas are sold all over the world. Obesity around the world is generally correlated to the level at which US style food culture is adopted.

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It seems to always be acceptable to blame the US for any problem but as pointed out in the article neither sugar cane, refined sugar nor high-fructose corn syrup originated in the US. And almost every "US style food" originated somewhere else. So should we blame Italy, France, China and Mexico too?

I would say the US may be primarily responsible for the technology (agricultural, supply chain, financing, etc) that made food potentially affordable to everyone. An unfortunate consequence of having enough food to eat is being able to eat too much.

Did you read the article? It argues directly against your claim that fructose is the primary culprit for obesity.

Fortunately, in most of the world sodas use sugar instead of syrup. So it's not as bad as it could be.

Isn't syrup just water with sugar? How is that worse?

He's referring to fructose syrup. To replace sugar, which is more expensive.

Except it takes about 5 seconds for sucrase in your small intestine to hydrolyze sugar into exactly the same substances present in HFCS. So it doesn't matter. At all.

Most HFCS in use today is a mixture of 45% glucose / 55% fructose. Sucrose is 1 glucose molecule and 1 fructose molecule bonded together. If fructose is really the 'bad' thing here, then HFCS has more of it.

It can be even worse than that. Studies have found some HFCS to contain as much as 65% fructose.

If you want to scrutinize american sodas, I think you have to look at the portion size and culture of free refills rather than the sugar type.

I don't know of anywhere else in the world that has serving sizes as big as the US. And very few places outside the US offer free refills.

Only the USA has an unusually high supply of fructose.

Everyone else uses cane sugar because it's cheaper.

People are getting fat because they like the taste of dense foods and those foods are cheaper and more available than ever before in history.

Did you read the article? Cane sugar is sucrose. The sucrose molecule gets broken up into a fructose and glucose molecule by the gut. Thus, cane sugar is for all intents and purposes 50% fructose. This is very similar to HFCS, which is 55% fructose.

I'm aware of that; it's the other reason why the HFCS hypothesis is broken. But it's much easier to draw the international comparisons.

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