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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> So they saw 'aging' with sugar-sweetened soda, the opposite with fruit juice, and no significant difference with diet sodas or non-carbonated sugary sodas.

What compounds in soda are most likely causing this? If they're not seeing the results in fruit juice, its not sugar causing the damage.

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There's more than one kind of sugar. Juices have both fructose and glucose; the former is more likely to be stored by the liver, the latter is deployed more widely around the body. Soda has much higher levels of fructose than glucose, thanks to all that high-fructose corn syrup that has become so popular with food manufacturers. There seems to be mounting evidence that high fructose intake is correlated with increased obesity. Here's a recent article on the topic: http://www.theguardian.com/society/the-shape-we-are-in-blog/...

If you head to YouTube and look for Dr Robert Lustig, a researcher at UCSF, there's a 1 or 2 hour lecutre he has delivered on this topic which goes into great detail ont eh different metabolic pathways different kinds of sugar take within the body.

I started to research what you said and it seems your mistaken (not sure since I don't know much about the topic).

From what I found, HFCS 55 which is used in soda is 55% fructose and 42% glucose. I haven't found the percentage of fructose and glucose in juices but apparently in a navel orange, there's an average of 8.5 of total sugars comprised of 2.25g fructose, 2.0g fructose and 4.3g of sucrose.

It seems that the ratio is the same as HFCS 55 for navel oranges but the difference is the presence of sucrose which seems not to be present in Soda. I'll have to read more to see if sucrose is more important...

Oh this thread is going to pull out all the fun ones. Can they program anything to penalize any diet / food topics? Nothing smart is ever said and all the studies are always inconclusive and at best hint at new directions for additional research.

Anyhow, to the above comment: http://nutritiondata.self.com/foods-000011000000000000000.ht...

Nutritional studies are worse than physiological studies. It's impossible to control for everything and just gets picked up but one side of the crazies or the other and like they will here just lead to a bunch of speculative anecdotal arguments.

Apart from this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500

From : " "A reduction in salt intake led to a significant fall in blood pressure, even in the healthy volunteers," explains Jens Titze, from Erlangen-Nuremberg University." .. "Titze gradually reduced the daily salt intake of the 'cosmonauts' during the course of the world's longest metabolism study, while keeping all other nutrients unchanged."

But well, it's not something every study can do.

[] http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10525/873...

Don't forget, the nutrition bloggers (paleo, vegan, etc) will get more fuel for cherry picked blog posts so they can sell more ads, products, newsletter sponsorships, etc.

They claim that they don't see any effect with non-carbonated sugary drinks, so the questionable HFCS bogeyman doesn't apply.

Dr. Lustig's views are not consistent with mainstream scientific opinions on the subject.[1] I would be careful about using his work to justify things.

[1] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-the-movie-fed-up-ma...

Nutrition doesn't work like that- there are too many variables. It could be something that fruit juice has and soda doesn't, it could be a confluence of factors that require lateral thinking.

Many fruit juices have potassium, which should help with heart health by counteracting the too much sodium we eat. Not sure why it would have any effect on telomeres though.

>too much sodium we eat.

I thought sodium was coming back into style in the latest nutrition fads.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/15/183883415/eating...

https://www.google.com/search?q=low+salt+diet+bad

From what I've heard, low salt is bad, but there is still an ideal potassium to salt ratio.

The sugar is causing the damage. Some studies also show some types of fruit juice being damaging, filtered juice being less healthy than unfiltered ones for example.

One quote from Wikipedia on the issue

"The total state of oxidative and peroxidative stress on the healthy body, with the AGE-related damage to it, is proportional to the dietary intake of exogenous (preformed) AGEs and the consumption of sugars with a propensity towards glycation such as fructose and galactose."

Would it be too far of a stretch to say that sugar->glucose->ATP conversion process is similar to nuclear fusion, with antioxidants being somewhat protective of the brittling/damage the process causes?

Could it be that sugar is responsible, but other stuff in fruit juice somehow inhibits it or compensates for it?

I was thinking in the opposite direction, that maybe sugar is responsible but the effect is triggered/compounded by the bubbles [or C02 or carbonic acid] in some way?

There's a joke in here about muddy waters [a cocktail made variously with coke and OJ] somewhere ...

I bet Deepak Chopra knows, and it has something to do with quantum energy.

possibly sodium benzoate: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21130826

That's also in diet and non-carbonated sugary sodas; it's used as a preservative in just about everything.

Maybe it's two compounds in combination? HFCS plus caffeine perhaps? Pure speculation of course.

Could be any number of things including a correlated behavior that they were unable to account for.

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