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Comment by jp555 | Hacker News Reader

Here we see 163 grams of dry white rice contains 123 grams of sugar -> http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cup+raw+rice

All non-fibre carbohydrates are metabolized as sugar, and it's VERY rare for our bodies to convert carbs into fat. All complex sugars are broken down into monosaccharides before absorption. Chew on a piece of bread for a couple minutes and enzymes in your saliva will break it down into glucose, and it will become sweet in your mouth.

Dextrose is glucose, and sugar does not directly make you fat. Eating a sustained caloric surplus makes you fat, no matter the macronutrient composition of your diet.

Here's more detail about the biochemistry of how we get fat - http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/how-we-get-fat.htm...

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>and it's VERY rare for our bodies to convert carbs into fat

Not THAT rare. Add alcohol, or just eat a whole lot of carbs and few fats[0].

[0]-http://examine.com/faq/how-are-carbohydrates-converted-into-...

Even with alcohol, it's the indirect mechanism of storing consumed fat when consuming ethanol-energy rather than turning the ethanol into fat. Ethanol is a VERY poor fat precursor. Converting ethanol to lipids is an extremely inefficient process; when it happens only a few % of ethanol-calories end up being converted into fat-calories.

Through a similar mechanism to alcohol, one can start up DNL much faster with large acute fructose consumption, but even in that "worst case scenario" we still only convert about 1% of surplus fructose into fat - http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/9/1/89

Somewhat ironically, a scenario where we make more fat from the carbs & protein we eat is when we consume very little fat. Eat less than 10% fat in your diet and this will cause DNL to ramp up. This is explained more in the "how we get fat" link in my previous comment.

Oops, sorry, I didn't state my case properly, I wasn't suggesting alcohol is converted into fat (which I've been taught is exactly zero- the body treats it as a toxin and it gains priority on using it - but I guess a small percent or fraction of a percent is small enough that zero is an approximation), but that glucose can be stored as fat in the presence of alcohol. Drink a beer and eat some bread and it's likely some or most of those calories will be stored as fat. Even the carbohydrates. Also carbohydrates in the beer (though not the alcohol).

Your last point was the main gist of my post, though I didn't spell it out so well. I didn't realize that about fructose though.

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