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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Maybe fructose really is a problem and we should be really careful with it.

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.

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You're wrong on the internet.

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

No shit, that's nearly 6 medium russet potatoes.

Unless you french them and fry them in oil, then you just need two.

Take that soda and replace the fructose with sucrose. You still get people drinking a gallon of it.

> 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.

Detrus is talking about proper food. You're talking about butter and mayo.

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...

Hey! There's only 57 calories in a tablespoon of mayo. If people are responsible and only use one or two tablespoons (to dip their fries, for example) then it is totally fine!

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.

This thread is full of people saying that HFCS is the cause of obesity, and merely avoiding fructose will cure obesity.

We agree that fructose is not the only problem, and that people eat crap, regardless of hfcs.

Yeah, but we have just now allowed to be fed even more poisonous stuff. It's neither positive nor irrelevant. It's a problem.

As usual, it's important to take pop-nutrition blurbs like this one with a grain of salt. Here's a counterpoint:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/21/eight_toxic_...

What's wrong with mayo? It's just eggs, oil, vinegar and a few spices. Seems pretty straightforward and far from an "abomination".

I mean don't eat it as a main course but throwing some into your chicken salad should be perfectly fine (and delicious...).

I think sugar based soda had less sugar per gallon. With HFCS they changed the recipe and added more, even though it's sweeter. Makes people buy more. Not sure what the case is now with back to sugar changes.

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.

Sugar has 50% fructose. HFCS has 42% to 55%, depending on variety. Are you sure the fructose in the corn syrup is the problem here?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

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.

It's true that eating raw things pulls on all sorts of threshold triggering a strong stop reflex, whereas one can eat processed food for long periods without even half of this 'im fed up' sensation.

If you care to do some research on the topic you will see that there is strong evidence pointing to chronic consumption of fructose damaging the metabolism in such a way that people no longer experience satiety the way a healthy person does. Over time this contributes to overconsumption as well as increased fat deposition which is a vicious cycle.

actually, could you pass a study that shows that. On pubmed, I see a lot of studies between carbs and protein.

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]

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682989/

>Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories.

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, we consume several times more fructose than we did 100 years ago.

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.

> many more

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.

Since fructose is sweeter, shouldn't it be harder with fructose - i.e., for the same sensation, you'd consume less fructose and thus less calories?

I would guess that it gets you used to sweeter flavors, craving more and needing more to hit the same level of sensation once you'd acclimated.

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.

I agree. Since I've decided to stop drinking cola and such beverages (about 8 years ago) I'm surprised how unpleasant and over-sugared their taste seems to me now. But this goes both for sugar and fructose - once the habit is broken, you really don't need it anywhere.

>Their problem is that they regularly eat thousands of extra calories

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."

But that's the point.

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.

It's a combination of factors. There's overeating, it's true. But there are also a lot of cheap, readily available foods out there that are packed with sugar. Need to make a cheap tomato sauce tastier? Add a little HFCS. Doesn't cost much, and makes it preferable to the next one.

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.

Eh, people should take responsibility for the shit they put in their bodies. No excuses, in my opinion.

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.

There is both a personal and collective responsibility. Yes, people should take responsibility for what they put in their body. But to do that, they need to have good things available that are affordable and not too inconvenient.

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.

That I will certainly agree with, and I fully understand that as a privileged middle-class white male with parents who have always stressed the importance of eating well and educated myself (and my siblings) as to how to look after ourselves, I'm one of the lucky ones.

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.

Eating too much is bad, and foodstuffs like Fructose clearly do not help. Fructose also has a link to cancer, which is separate to weight issues and should be the main focus of debate

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/

Yeah, that's all well and good except that fructose make you really hungry which is a large part of why Americans CONSUME more. Avoid fructose unless you are building up your fat reserve for a fallow winter.

I'd tend to partially agree with you: the amount of sugar added to almost all processed food is terrifying, and there's good evidence it's extremely bad for you.

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.

I sling code. I'm not a biologist. YMMV.

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.)

What's the HN-comment-summary of paleo? I.e. what do you eat/not eat?

Lots of veggies, some fruit, nuts, meat. Four Hour Body throws in slow carbs like legumes (black beans). Ferriss also advises one "cheat day" per week, for eating treats, for both psychology and something about hormones (which I don't understand). This week it was cheesecake and croissants.

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