Thu, Mar-20-08, 17:02
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Senior Member
Posts: 4,367
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Plan: I'm a Barry Girl
Stats: 250/208/190
BF:
Progress: 70%
Location: Colorado
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What’s so bad about fructose?
http://www.manilatimes.net/national...080319lif1.html
Quote:
Why having a sweet tooth may be the new alcoholism
By Rome Jorge, Lifestyle Editor
It naturally occurs in fruits as well as in honey and cereals. It’s 1.2 to 1.8 times sweeter than table sugar—meaning you need less and consume fewer calories to achieve the same sweetness—and is cheaper and has a longer shelf life. Fruit juices, herbal iced-teas, natural “sugar-free” fruit jams and other self-proclaimed health foods have it. So too do most processed foods—from soft drinks to hotdogs to hotdog buns. It’s fructose and it is ubiquitous.
But as a growing number of doctors allege, just like alcohol, excessive amounts of fructose can also damage your liver and turn it into a fatty mess. And just like alcohol, they contend that it can hook you into craving for more.
Fructose is processed mostly by the liver, unlike other types of sugar such as glucose that are absorbed by every organ in the body. Consuming too much fructose can overwork and damage this vital organ and lead to a host of problems.
Ironically, fructose was once favored especially for diabetics because, unlike other kinds of sugar, it is unregulated by insulin, the hormone that diabetics cannot produce sufficiently by themselves.
Insulin is the hormone that signals your body to store fat instead of burning it, making one feel sluggish and crave for more food.
Fructose does not cause erratic blood sugar levels. However it can increase you insulin levels by making the liver insensitive to insulin—meaning your body needs to send out more insulin just to get the message across.
Too much insulin interferes with leptin—the hormone produced by fat cells themselves that counterbalance insulin and that signal the body that you have eaten enough.
Dr. Robert Lustig Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, in a radio interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. on July 9, explained, “Leptin resistance and obesity are actually the same thing.”
Furthermore Lustig declared, “Energy burning and quality of life are the same thing. Anything that raises your energy expenditure makes you feel good. Anything that reduces your energy expenditure … makes you feel lousy. When you can’t see your leptin, your brain thinks you’re starving, you feel crappy, you certainly don’t want to exercise and you’re going to eat more.”
It can be inferred that anything that that interferes with your body’s sensitivity to its own appetite-regulating hormones—allegedly such as the pervasive use of fructose in processed foods—will hook you into eating more, tricking the body that it isn’t sated yet. Fructose is not only cheaper for manufacturers, critics also contend that it can make you buy more of their foodstuffs. Lustig noted that the rise in child obesity in recent years parallels the widespread usage of fructose by the food and beverage industries.
“You end up with your inability to see your leptin and so you consume more fructose and you’ve now got a vicious cycle out of control. In fact fructose, because of the way it’s metabolized, is actually damaging your liver the same way alcohol is. In fact it’s the exact same pathway, in fact fructose is alcohol without the buzz.” Lustig declared.
Lustig enumerates the damages to the liver wrought by excessive fructose consumption: increased uric acid, hypertension, excess fat production and interference to the liver’s insulin receptors.
Meira Field, Ph.D., a research chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture, states in her book Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts: “The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic.”
For their part, Calorie Control Council, a fructose industry advocate, counters: “Recent unfounded allegations suggest that fructose is uniquely responsible for the current obesity crisis in the US These allegations—such as increased fat production or increased appetite—are based on poorly conceived experimentation of little relevance to the human diet, which tests unphysiologically high levels of fructose as the sole carbohydrate, often in animals that are poor models for human metabolism. The consequences of such exaggerated diets are predictably extreme.”
Lustig admits he is working with the Atkins Foundation—advocate of the low-carbohydrate, high-protein and high fiber diet—to conduct a fructose withdrawal experiments on humans to validate his allegations.
The bone of contention is the definition of excess. How much is too much?
Since fructose became the preferred sweetener of food manufacturers, consumption per person in America has risen from less than half a pound in 1970 to 56 pounds in 2003. The use of fructose, most often derived from corn syrup, is pervasive. Not all manufacturers list what type of sugar they use. The average can of soft drink contains eight to nine teaspoons of sugar.
Too much of any kind of sugar, carbohydrate or fat—meaning more calories than one burns—will lead to unhealthy weight gain and all its related health problems.
So how does one stop one’s self from consuming too much fructose or any other type of sugar, carbohydrate or fat for that matter?
Stop binging on processed foods such as soft drinks, candy bars and cookies. Buy fruits and drink plain tap water instead of fruit juices and flavored bottled water. Cook lean meat off the wet market instead of hotdogs and burgers off the fast food stalls. And sweat it out.
Both fructose industry advocates and critics agree that exercise and fresh fruits are essential to well being.
Exercise not only burns fat, it more importantly makes your muscles sensitive to insulin once again—meaning your body needs to send out less of the fat-storing hormone to get its message across. Exercise also reduces cortisol—the stress hormone that signals the body to store visceral fat. And exercise also helps you detoxify too much fructose.
But if excessive fructose is bad, why is eating plenty of fruits good for you?
The difference between fruit juices and fresh fruits is dietary fiber. You’d have to eat a lot of fruits—and their natural fibers—to get the same amount fructose found in fruit juices and jams. The bulk that fresh fruit fiber provides satiates you before you can overdose on fructose. And you get all the health benefits of fiber as well as the vitamins and minerals.
The answer is to go back to the way it was and the way it should be—all-natural.
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