Fructose: The Poison Index
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But when we look at people who are obese their problem is not that they eat fructose containing foods, or that they regularly eat a couple of hundred extra calories per day. Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories.
When you get 4,000 extra calories it doesn't matter whether it's glucose or sucrose or fructose - the person is going to gain weight and be harmed by the sugar.
The reason that Americans are fatter than Europeans is not because the US uses more fructose, it is because Americans eat a lot more than Europeans. But Europe is catching up. The UK has plenty of obesity and we don't have nearly so much fructose use as the US.
The fructose being talked about isn't the nice one in fruits. It's corn syrup or sugar in soda. Yes, obese people consume incredible amounts of it. A gallon a day. Those Texas sized doses of soda you can order with your meal actually get consumed.
It's very difficult to consume even 1000 extra calories from proper food, like potatoes. They fill you up. And I can barely get a layer of fat. With soda you won't even notice the consumption. And it screws with insulin in the blood like fruits and potatoes never could. Makes you absorb more.
Some powerlifters eat junk food precisely because it contains more calories per stomach stuffing material. Ruins bloodwork but gets results. So do steroids.
> It's very difficult to consume even 1000 extra calories from proper food, like potatoes.
This is just not true. People find it easy to overeat. They add a little bit of butter here, some mayo there, have a drizzle of salad dressing, a nice snack. It all adds up.
A huge part of the problem is that people equate these things just as you have. Mayo in particular is an abomination. What we have come to accept as "food" is tragic[1].
[1]http://www.livestrong.com/slideshow/1007800-11-banned-food-i...
People need to learn to eat slower and really savour the food. Small portions of more intensely flavoured food is way better than huge, bulky meals of starch and meat and sugar. Whole grains too! I used to eat a half pound of regular pasta topped with several cups of cheap meat sauce. Now I eat 1/5 of a pound of whole grain multigrain pasta mixed with 3/4 cup of high quality marinara sauce (no meat) alongside a nice big salad (with minimal dressing). It tastes way better and is much healthier.
We agree that fructose is not the only problem, and that people eat crap, regardless of hfcs.
I mean don't eat it as a main course but throwing some into your chicken salad should be perfectly fine (and delicious...).
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_...
What I had in mind was intentionally consuming 1000 calories of proper food on top of a diet that covers physical activity. Often 3-5000 calories. You know you're stuffing yourself then.
And assuming the butter and mayo aren't packed with extra sweetener or leptin suppressors, they're not a big deal. They won't cause insulin spikes. A drizzle of typical salad dressing is full of HFCS though. Gotta eat your vegetables!
But note that soda doses and recipes changed around 1990. That's also when the word fat didn't quite describe the state of a growing number of people. You can get fat on greasier food. Fatter on sugary sweets. But nothing digests faster and makes your body react like liquid packed with HFCS and salt. Salt makes you thirst for more and more HFCS blocks out its taste. That's how those bucket sized cups get consumed.
No shit, that's nearly 6 medium russet potatoes.
It's a longer video (1h 30m), but it explains the problem with fructose in exactly as much detail as it needs and is very "average" people friendly.
On the fructose vs glucose side, I see most studies pointing out the bad effects of a high carb diet (where carbs = starch/glucose/fructose/sucrose), but nothing that compares fructose with glucose per se.
In fact, I see there are a few studies that show fructose is better than glucose, but they are primarily funded by the ILSI [1]
Which is so much easier with fructose. It gets in the way of feeling full and it has lots of kcal.
Nowadays, we consume several times more fructose than we did 100 years ago. Our bodies still handle it very poorly.
If you want to lose weight, watching your fructose intake will make it a lot easier.
Nowadays people consume very many more calories than we did 100 years ago, and people in countries where HFCS isn't used still get fat.
When someone says they stopped eating HFCS it's not stopping the fructose that helps them lose weight, it's stopping drinking all those extra empty calories that helps them lose weight.
That's not the same as several times more. If I remember correctly, it was something along the lines of 500% more. It's a crazy amount of fructose. And there usually is very little fiber (which you'd get with fruits) to slow down the absorption rate.
HFCS isn't that different from sugar. The only real problem is that it's even cheaper than sugar.
Theoretically, you could use a bit less because it's a little bit sweeter than sugar, but no one seems to do that.
HFCS is a very cheap way to make your crappy product taste like something. That's why it's everywhere.
I believe I've seen studies that show that even artificial sweeteners leave you with a sweet tooth that cause you to seek out more sugary foods without realizing it.
I know from personal experience, that after I had stopped drinking soda for a while, when I try it again I find it cloyingly sweet. I can't stand the stuff. But for people who have been used to drinking it for years, it tastes perfectly normal.
While I appreciate the response, you're not providing any reasoning as to why.
By your logic it's equivalent of saying "he's an alcoholic because he drinks too much."
Using the alcoholic analogy people are saying "alcoholism is caused by grain! Grain does X and that's really bad!" when really, while grain might be bad, it's the alcohol that's the real problem.
Fructose might be bad, but the real problem is the huge amount of over eating that people do. And people still get obese even in countries that do not use HFCS.
I'm also constantly surprised at the number of people who drink soda on a daily basis. It's carbonated sugar water, it's terrible for you, but some people just can't seem to stop drinking it. You wouldn't think to claim that someone who drank two Cokes in a day was "overeating", but that's equivalent to eating an extra hamburger per day; if someone ordered another hamburger on top of their lunch, you'd think it a bit excessive.
Diet Soda doesn't help as much as people think. It turns out that it still leaves you with a hell of a sweet tooth, and craving more sugar.
Then there are all of the food products out there that tout themselves as healthy options. Which one do you think is lower calorie, a burrito or a Caesar Salad? Well, it turns out due to all the glop they put in the dressing, a fairly loaded burrito with rice, beans, and sour cream can be lower calorie, lower saturated fat, and higher in fiber than a Caesar Salad.
So, there are a lot of things about modern diets that make it particularly prone to overeating. Between salty snacks that you compulsively eat, sugar levels in everything creeping up, food touted as healthy that's anything but, and the like, coupled with (as you mention) overeating and a sedentary lifestyle, it's no wonder people get fat.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be concerned about the HFCS. No, HFCS is not "poison" or "toxic". But it is excessively cheap and overused. If you avoid HFCS (and aren't stupid about it by simply substituting foods that have an equivalent amount of other sugars), you can avoid a lot of the foods that are bad for you that sort of sneak up on you.
I also blame a lot of this on the whole "low fat" fad. In efforts to reduce fat as much as possible, lots of food manufacturers looked to other things to enhance the flavor of their foods. Sugar is an easy way to do so.
I swear half the problem is that people don't cook anymore. I cook every meal from as close to scratch as possible (I really enjoy it). Same with the rest of my family, and we are all super healthy weights. Plural of anecdote is not data, but I always wondered whether that had something to do with it.
People eat what is cheap and convenient. We would do well to try and reduce the trend to make the most cheap convenient food by making processed food that's full of stuff that's bad for you.
But, what I've found as someone who once lived on the streets and have been so poor that I had to steal tinned tomatoes to be able to eat, even when poor you can do okay (well, not on the streets, but if you've got a roof over your head it's okay) -- and in my personal experience, it was _cheaper_ to cook your own food that eschews large amounts of sugar and processed crap. That's basically what I can't seem to reconcile.
Good points though, and society does have a part to play; I just think that we can do better on a personal level as well.
However I agree with you that simply identifying Fructose as a smoking gun / evildoer for obesity is wrong.
There seem to be combination of special interest groups focussing on making Fructose an issue:
* Anti American bile - The school of thought that: American Big Business pushes this stuff, ergo it must be evil and manipulative
* Trying to sell diet books enriching the author. This Fructose issue is the fashionable kernel of truth that such books strive for; They hang snake-oil padding around such facts.
Research shows there is a strong genetic influence on obesity: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2570383/
And that's something we suffer from in the UK, too. I recall one particularly eye-opening moment in Sainsburys' when I checked a chilli to find out it was 5% sugar by weight. That's a lot of sugar in a savoury dish.
Not all calories are the same.
Doing the Four Hour Body, paleo, troglodiet (tm), I can't eat enough. In fact, the more I eat, the more body fat I lose. It's crazy. I even managed to convince my gf, who now eats with abandon, and she's lost 30lbs so far.
Ferriss warns in an early chapter that you will eat more than you've ever eaten before. Chomping thru 3 yummy kale salads (or equiv) per day, I stop eating when I'm tired of chewing. My salads are stuffed with calories, like bacon, turkey, avocado, tahini, craisins, etc.
Back to the fructose...
All I know comes from Lustig (sorry, I'm still not a biologist), why refined foods like HFCS are bad. The different metabolic pathway for fruit juice vs fruit. The sucrose splits into fructose and glucose. Body needs glucose whereas fructose is poison (just like alcohol). The fiber found in fruit et al blocks digestion of the fructose.
Sugar, the Bitter Truth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
I don't have any cites for how fructose is crack for cancers. I assume it's true. Diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are reason enough to avoid fructose.
(Further, I vote with my dollars. Screw the corn lobby and their market distorting subsidies.)
I went off paleo for a year or so, now back on for a few months and have gone from 178 to 162 lbs. without doing much else than cutting out sugar, gluten grains and plant oils. It's strange this time; when I occasionally eat these things, I feel slightly, but noticeably ill for about a day afterwards.
Anyhow if this type of diet interests you, I want you to check out his blog because it is a slightly different approach than other "paleo". You need not eat super low carb as long as it is the right type of carbs and you don't have a ton of weight to lose. He also suggests cream if you don't have leaky gut (I drink tons in coffee every day).
These are a couple tidbits from his entry on glucose: http://www.archevore.com/panu-weblog/2011/2/5/no-such-thing-...
"Glucose is a necessary internal fuel source and metabolite and it is also a food and the building block of foods that have the longest evolutionary history of any food that mammals use. It is a fact that we do not require glucose in the diet, and that we can make it from amino acids if we don't eat it. However, rather than viewing this as evidence that glucose is not important, we should view this as evidence that glucose is so metabolically important that we have evolved way to make sure we always have it." ...
"Like glucose, there is no dietary requirement for fructose, but unlike glucose, we do not require fructose for use as an internal fuel. There is no organ like the brain that has an absolute fructose requirement. In fact, our body has mechanisms that evolved specifically to keep most cells from being exposed to too much of it." ...
"To keep fructose out of the general circulation, it must be immediately burned or stored as fat. Fructose is related to the spectrum of serious diseases known as NAFLD (non-alcoholic liver disease), including fatty liver and cirrhosis."
Yes, it's not fashionable to follow the updated HHS guidelines for healthy eating, but they are rooted in well-tested science. The USDA and HHS invest quite a bit into getting these guidelines right continuing to improve them as science advances. I have not seen a dietary platform as rigorously studied as the one provided by HHS.
This is the summary from the 2010 guidelines:
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, released on January 31, 2011, emphasize three major goals for Americans:
- Balance calories with physical activity to manage weight
- Consume more of certain foods and nutrients such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy products, and seafood
- Consume fewer foods with sodium (salt), saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars, and refined grains
Also notice it specifically recommends the very things we are discussing here- omitting added sugar & refined grains.
Anyway, my key point was that they have clearly been adjusting recommendations with the times, and being wrong in the past doesn't mean they should never be trusted again- that isn't how science works. (This is food science)
In general, it is very difficult to do controlled, large population studies over a human life span. Instead, lots of studies rely on self-reported surveys, measurements of various indicators that are believed to correlate with poor heath effects over a very short period, and so on.
Mapping from "we know that if you eat X, the Y level in your blood rises over the next 24 hours, and in a separate study we have shown that Y is correlated with chronic disease Z" is actually a pretty poor argument for "X causes Z", and even more of a poor argument for "thus, you should eliminate X from your diet", and telling people to eliminate "X" from their diet doesn't necessarily always lead to simply the desired effect of eliminating "X", but may lead to them replacing it with "W" which is even worse.
Human bodies and human behavior are quite complex. The actual effects of a particular recommendation are not well understood. By making recommendations and policy from science that was not well enough understood, we may have increased the rate of growth of the obesity epidemic over the past 30 years or so. This has happened, in part, by over-emphasizing "low fat" which encouraged people to replace fat with sugars.
So, food policy recommendation are not food science. They may be influenced by science, but they are different. And I generally take them with a very large grain of salt.
Instead, we can find strategies that, at least anecdotally, seem to work better than adhering to the latest fad diet or the government recommendations. Eat real food; plants and animals that have been minimally processed before getting to you. The more processing that has been done, the more the foods have likely been optimized for something other than nutritional value and flavor (shelf life, profits, etc). Don't eat too much; whatever you do, if you want to lose weight, eating less across the board will likely achieve that. Food that is decadent is likely good to have only in small quantities; if it's sweet or greasy, it's probably good to limit to lower quantities. Get exercise daily; walk, or bike somewhere, hit the gym, do an outdoor activity, or something, don't go from bed to car to chair to car to couch to bed.
Following these kinds of recommendations may not seem as official or authoritative as the government or some author selling a new diet book. But anecdotally, they work pretty well, and they aren't likely to be skewed by various parties monetary interests or simply bad interpretation and over-generalization of good scientific data.
Was that a controlled study, or was "nonfat" high carb snacking a confounding factor?
Sugar - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...
Fats - http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-...
I was never crazy about coconut anything. Blech.
Now I cook with it, a morning smoothie, and crave macaroons and coconut flour paleo treats.
I'm not just talking about the US government here - but almost all western governments have got it wrong on nutrition for the last half century or so. It seems that Sweden is the first to buck the trend - I hope others catch on before they cost us more billions in health care spending trying to fix the symptoms of what they have caused.
I particularly trust the FDA because there is no clear direction that lobbying would bias them in. All industries want their food to be called "healthy", and all of these industries are fairly organized or centralized. So I don't see any reason to think the FDA is biased toward a particular food or industry.
LCHF (Low Carb High Fat) has become popular in Sweden lately. You can read an introduction[1] and a page with references[2]. LCHF is basically a "paleo" approach.
I've had several overweight acquaintance who have tried it out and it has worked out great every single time. It is perhaps a bit extreme to disallow nearly all carbs, but on the other hand no other diet will let you eat as much (of the good stuff) you can - and still work.
Another blogger tried out what happens if you overeat calories[3], both eating carbs and eating low-fat. Quite amusing to see the results as nearly everyone is stuck in the calorie counting mindset.
[1]: https://www.dietdoctor.com/lchf [2]: http://www.dietdoctor.com/science [3]: http://live.smashthefat.com/5000-calorie-carb-challenge-day-...
Yes, glucose is needed and fabricated by the body, but one of the things the body does with glucose is synthesise glycogen.
Glycogen is stored in the muscles and liver. Now, glucose is good for replenishing both, fructose is bad at replenishing muscle glycogen.
How tall are you though? If you're 6ft+ that's not a good look.
When it comes to Big Food (or Big Pharma, Big Insurance etc.), I'd prefer - at the very minimum - taking any claims against them at face value instead of dismissing them outright. Of course, follow it up with your own research.
Less resourceful people, like me, prefer a more common-sense approach of searching & reading multiple authors & articles to arrive at something they feel could be reasonably close to the truth.
Because Greenwald is in possession of a secret stash of documents leaked to him and only a few other people on the planet have access to those documents. Are you saying that Lustig has some secret data about fructose that only he knows about?
It's expert consensus vs a guy being loud.
Now don't say "conspiracy" because then you're just being faddist and contrarian.
Maybe it's always Robert Lustig because he's the name people already recognize. Maybe he's the one doing most of the research in the area. Sometimes, the public need a figurehead to keep explaining something to us until we get it.
A simple googling of "fructose daily consumption" (or equiv) yields zillions of links. It's not like Lustig is a lone wolf.
But people should go some steps further: The whole composition of stuff most people eat is wrong (low fat, high carb).
I recommend having a look at paleo-style diets (e.g. http://www.gnolls.org/1141/ ) which mean high fat, mid protein, low carb. They provide more satiety, no after-lunch tiredness and a lot more.
My own way was going from no fructose (thanks to Lustig's video) to now cutting grains too. Feels good.
EDIT: And forget about counting calories or thinking that (eating fat == becoming fat). That's not how digestion works. Calories were afaik defined by burning (with an actual flame) the food. That's not how your organs, enymes, stomach, ..., bacteria work.
So, just don't eat glucose or white sugar together with fructose or just stop it.
White sugar is the poison, not fructose.
Good proteins, healthy fats, and vegetables are the things that make us feel sated.
Sugars and carbs in particular don't have a sating effect on people, hence you are prone to overeating, if you only eat those foods.
This is why most fast food and convenience stores sell things that are comprised of sugar, carbs and fat. They're in the business of selling you more, not selling you "just enough".
I don't think we should blame these companies btw, people have free will, and an occasional soda or candy bar won't kill you. It's just that too many people see these foods as a daily ritual.
------ Just an opinion from someone who has researched this space a bit due to my gluten intolerance.
It seems like the author is really set on rejecting the conclusions of these meta-analyses.
Any diet that keeps you just above the limits of starvation is going to show no change in weight gain.
A much more compelling study would be an overfeeding experiment between a high fructose diet, high glucose diet, high protein diet, high fat diet, etc.
>Fizzy drinks can have a 'serum fructose concentration of six micromolar, enough to do major arterial and pancreatic damage'.
You're telling me that if I replace my blood with fizzy drinks, it could do major arterial and pancreatic damage? Wow, who knew?
a 20oz soda RESULTS IN a serum fructose concentration of six micromolar
Additionally, the key point is that the sucrose would be replaced with just fructose, which if done by weight would mean roughly twice as much fructose in the food. With the position the article has on fructose this seems like an obviously worse position, however I would love to see sources on it.
It at least got one thing right - fructose is terrible for you. Therefore, sucrose is also terrible for you.
"Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. Series: UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public [7/2009] [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 16717]"
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-ab...
The fundamental message is that the chronic effects of fructose are similar to the chronic effects of alcohol because they're metabolised almost identically in the liver.
Aragon's only argument against the biochemistry presented is that it's "all about dose and context" ... well if you chronically consume alcohol then you get pretty fucked up in the liver right? So if you're chronically consuming fructose in the same way you'll get fucked up, too.
Really, the article doesn't refute any of the core claims, it only says that we can eat some fructose just the same as we can eat some alcohol, big deal. That doesn't mean I'm going to start feeding my kids lollies, fizzy drinks, fruit juice and donuts now, does it?
I've been called out for citing Micheal Pollan (Omnivore's Dilemma). I was shocked. But apparently anything that challenges the status quo is suspect.
What it does say is that overall calorie consumption has increased since 1970 but the fraction of calories from added sugar has not (no claim about fructose consumption specifically?), that fructose is almost always found along with glucose, so the fact that fructose does not induce an insulin response doesn't mean that foods containing fructose aren't satiating, that the Japanese do eat some fruit, that most fruits have less fiber than sugarcane, and that dosage is relevant to toxicity.
Couldn't Aragon be right about every one of these points without refuting Lustig's central claim? Can't it simultaneously be true that consuming too many total calories is harmful, and that consuming too much fructose is also harmful?
Remember when fat was the mortal enemy? Cholesterol? Carbs of any sort? Salt? Now it's fructose.
All of these things have, at one point or another, been singled out as one of the biggest threats to public health. And in all cases, while there has been some truth that in excess they can cause problems, it turns out that they aren't nearly as bad as some people made them out to be, and going on a crusade to eliminate them from diets has lead to either unhealthy elimination of necessary nutrients, or unhealthy substitution by something that's worse.
And yes, if you want more evidence, there have been studies that have shown that at low dosages, fructose can be beneficial:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&...
Basically, if you see someone singling out one single nutrient that has been a central part of our diet for thousands of years as being "toxic", you know you're being sold snake oil. Yes, almost anything can be consumed to excess. No, it is not "toxic".
Any diet plan should be based on your whole diet, not eliminating a single thing. Reducing refined sugar in your diet is generally good. Avoiding a cookie now and then, or some honey on your toast, is excessive (unless you are actually diabetic).
It can help a lot to cook yourself, and only prepare food from raw ingredients rather than processed foods or mixes, as then you see how much sugar and how much salt and how much fat goes into something. If you were to mix up a can of soda from scratch, you'd find it pretty gross how much sugar went in there; but many people are willing to grab a few and drink them throughout a day without thinking about it.
<= 10g/meal, or <= 30g/day.
Half the typical consumption.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2525476/
I'm reasonably certain that I'm hitting 30g/day eating fresh fruit. No HFCS required.
Anyhow, like anything, context matters here. Fresh fruit is high in fiber, which tends to lead to less absorption of sugars and other carbohydrates. The equivalent amount of fructose in soda or fruit juice is much worse for you than in the form of whole fresh fruits.
If you take a look at that study you link to about average consumption, over half of it comes from "sugar sweetened beverages" and "grains" (which includes cakes, pies, snacks, breads, and cereals). So, the average American could cut their fructose level in half, to under that suggested limit, by merely cutting out sodas and sweetened baked goods. My personal recommendation is to never drink soda, and only have sweetened baked goods occasionally, no more often than once a week.
My only point is that most Americans don't eat more than that amount in fruit, but rather that they go over that amount mostly due to sweetened beverages and baked goods.
I've switched to a morning smoothie for convenience. 1/2 bunch of kale, chard, or spinach as a base. Plus variety of banana, apple, ginger, frozen fruits (blueberries, mango, peach, strawberries, etc), hemp hearts, heavy coconut milk, cinnamon, sometimes others stuff (mint, turmeric, yoghurt) to add variety.
Per Dr Terry Wahls, goal is to get 9 cups of veggies per day. I usually hit 6 cups.
I definitely agree that people are eating too much fructose, and too much sugar in general, and that it has been driven by several government interventions (fat-free diet advice, corn subsidies, etc). I just object to calling it a "toxin" or "poison", and find his single minded obsession with fructose to be a bit of a poor way to attack the problem in the same way that single minded obsessions with "fat free" or "no carb" were. Human diet is a complex topic, with a lot of interacting factors, and over-simplifying advice can be quite harmful.
His research defines a clear link between genetics and obesity, fructose or no fructose. Obviously less intake is better, but many people cannot stop themselves if there is available food. On the other hand, there are people who will stay lean no matter how much food is available.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2570383/
Human Obesity: A Heritable Neurobehavioral Disorder That Is Highly Sensitive to Environmental Conditions