From The Mail
London, UK
26 June, 2008


Can fruit make you fat? Natural sugar in fruit is 'fuelling the nation's obesity epidemic'


A natural sugar found in fruit is fuelling the obesity epidemic, scientists say.

A study has shown that fructose - which is used to sweeten soft drinks and junk food - might be more harmful than other types of sugar.

In tests, fat people given large doses of fructose were more likely to put on weight around the stomach than those given glucose.

Doctors say this 'intra-abdominal fat' is the most harmful type and is linked to diabetes and heart disease.

Pure fructose is found in fresh fruit, fruit juice and jam.

However, it also sneaks into our diet through the high-fructose corn syrup used in food manufacturing.

Concerns about fructose and high-fructose corn syrup have been growing.

Some experts believe they play a major role in the obesity crisis sweeping Britain and the U.S.

Scientists at the University of California put 33 overweight adults on a diet comprising 30 per cent fat, 55 per cent complex carbohydrates such as bread and rice, and 15 per cent protein for a fortnight.

For a further ten weeks they were moved to a diet in which a quarter of their energy came from either fructose or glucose, New Scientist reports today.

Both groups put on the same amount of weight - 1.5kg or 3.3 pounds.

However, volunteers on the fruit sugar diet put on more intra-abdominal fat, which wraps around their internal organs and causes pot bellies.

Those eating fructose also had higher levels of cholesterol.

The study, led by Dr Peter Havel, looked only at pure fructose - not high-fructose corn syrup. However the syrup breaks down into fructose and glucose in the body.

Dr Havel said: 'The question is what is the amount of high-fructose corn syrup or normal sugar you need to consume to get these effects?'

The finding suggests that the number of calories in food might not be as important as the type of sugar it contains.

A cake made with fructose could do more harm than one made with glucose.

A spokesman for PepsiCo, which sponsored Dr Havel's work, said: 'This is a very interesting and important study. But it does not reflect a real-world situation nor is it applicable to PepsiCo since pure fructose is not an ingredient in any of our food and beverage products.'

In a separate study, Dr Havel's researchers compared the immediate effects of consuming a meal in which 25 per cent of the energy came from either high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose, fructose or glucose.

The level of triglycerides - or fats - in the blood were all elevated to a similar level 24 hours after consuming fructose, sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup, but not glucose, according to the findings published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Sucrose breaks down into fructose and glucose in the body.

Dr Francine Kaufman, of the Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles, said: 'It adds to what we have known for a long time.

'It's probably not a good idea to consume too much sugar.'

Experts point out that this does not mean we should stop eating fruit.

Fresh fruit contains relatively low levels of fructose - and the risks are outweighed by health benefits.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/a...y-epidemic.html

From The Telegraph
London, UK
26 June, 2008


Sugar from fruit 'encourages a pot belly'

Fruit sugars found in soft drinks could be worse for your health than other kinds of sugar because they encourage the development of a "pot belly", a new study shows.

Scientists know that people who carry large amounts of fat around their middle are at a much greater risk of developing heart disease and diabetes.

New research suggests that fruit sugars, known as fructose, are more likely to cause this effect than other types.

The findings, highlighted by New Scientist magazine, could point to a factor behind the rise in the prevalence of some conditions in recent decades.

Fructose is found in fresh fruit, fruit juice and jams, but also in large quantities in soft drinks, many of which are made with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Scientists tested the impact of a high fructose diet against one containing large amounts of other types of sugar.

They put 33 overweight and obese adults on a "normal" diet for 10 weeks, followed by another 10 weeks in which half the group received a quarter of their calories from fructose and the other half the same amount from glucose.

The findings show that both groups put on the same amount of weight, around 3.3 lb, over the 20 week experiment.

However, while those eating high amounts of fructose accumulated fat around their middle, in the glucose group extra weight was spread across the body.

Peter Havel, from the University of California, Davis, who led the study, said that more research was needed to establish the exact link between fructose and obesity.

However, he recommended that people who suffer from metabolic syndrome, a range of conditions including belly fat and insulin resistance that raise the risk of diabetes and heart disease, cut down on the number of fructose-containing soft drinks they consume.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...t-belly%22.html

Another point supporting the idea that fruit is good in small quantites while in season, but not as a main item of your diet.

I would like to know how they decided that the benefits of fruit outweigh the effects of sugar.

It's interesting that the study was sponsored by Pepsi. Maybe, just maybe, companies like Pepsi could convince US "guvmint" to stop the price controls on sugar which many say have caused the switch to HFCS and led to some candy companies to go to Canada and elsewhere (Lifesavors). I don't really know why I care --sugar aint that much better.

Yeah, and it's good that Pepsi doesn't use "Pure Fructose", just "High Fructose"...

Written without any data to support the statement.

That said, I don't think small amounts of fruit are harmful....but I do think fruit needs to be in context to the diet as a whole and is better in season than our new concept of 'year-round' day in day out consumption!

It's not nice to fool mother nature.

When you check the nutritional content of fruit vs. vegetables, the vegetables win hands down. I do eat a few berries & cream now & then with a meal. However, I'd like to know what nutrients you get from fruit that you can't get from non-starchy vegetables in greater quantities.

Of course it depends on what you call fruit. Lots of our vegetable food can be called Fruit. Beans, peas, squash, tomatoes, corn, nut, even grains - anything that develops from the flower and holds seed. Such fruits are probably made to be eaten, and are designed to entice us to carry their seeds away from the parent plant. They all have more carbs than most leafy food.

But then as soon as you consider that plants are attempting to trick us into doing their work by loading us up with addictive sugars and indigestible fiber, making our bowels misoperate and causing us to expell seeds undigested, you start to not trust fruit so much.

In all seriousness, I really doubt that -- with the exception of people living on orange and apple juices -- many people are killing themselves with too much fruit in our society. The people I know compost more fruit than they eat, and they don't buy much to start with. The pies and caramel dip around the fruit is less help of course. :-) The way I grew up -- past early childhood when I half lived on the trees outside and meat fortunately -- fruit meant a fruit rollup, or a little cherry pie in a package, or a blueberry muffin. Actually just eating fruit itself was rare except for grapes and sometimes strawberries soaked in sugar water.... occasionally a banana or plum. Maybe if people ate more real fruit, even the sugary ones, they'd be eating less other crap. Surely fruit has got to be the lesser of the carb evils.

Like I said, I think it's context...some berries or even other fruits aren't harmful IMO, but add a variety of ways to get in micronutrients that, yeah, you can also get in non-starchy vegetables. There are quite a few things classified as 'vegetable' that are really fruit too - tomatoes, summer squash, macadamia nuts, cucumbers, etc.....so it's kind of a moot issue if you ask me since much of what we call vegetables are fruits, and I doubt anyone is going to debate whether having cucumbers or yellow squash is a bad thing...IMO it's context that matters more.....and hey, a handful of blueberries or some sliced strawberries on a salad kick butt, especially when topped with some good blue cheese too!

When I grew up it was common to eat fruit most of the day. I would pick oranges on the way to and from school, in my yard and along the road, there were ripe indian river bananas half the season, dates, mulberries, various wild berries in the woods and cheap fruit in the stores.

As an adult, perhaps my friends were different because of my interests, but fruit was a staple. Fresh orange juice every day, lots of mango and papaya, most people grew pineapples in the yard as well as a variety of citrus, even fish was often cooked with fruit slices. In the yard I just moved away from we had two different oranges (which just about spanned the year for ripe fruit), a big peach, some blueberries and thornless blackberry, many pineapples, a pair of kiwis and some mangos. If you add in our neighbor who begged us to take fruit, we had avocado, grapefruit, limes and kumquat. Almost everyone had to set up a fruit stand out by the road to try to get rid of fruit. I drove a lot of mine to the Community food basket where it was very welcome.

But I ate a ton of it. Every day. I dried and preserved fruit, made fruit smoothies every day and loaded it into almost every thing I ate.

No wonder I got fat. Combined with the honey from our bees and the amount of grains I ate, I could have kept an elephant fat.

Wow, where did you grow up? I've never even SEEN a pineapple tree.

I agree that fruit juices are pretty deadly sugar-bombs.

Pineapples grow on the ground like bromeliads, which they are. They look just like the top except they keep getting bigger and wider. You can grow one by purchasing a whole pineapple, cutting off the top and letting it dry a day, then just put in on some dirt and pack it in with dried grass or compost. Two or three years later it will start making pineapples for you. When I bought my house I stopped by a grocery store and asked for their tops from when they prepared cut pineapple and made myself a plantation.

I grew up on the east coast of Florida, surrounded by Orange groves and backyards full of specimen tropical fruit trees. Although most of the Orange groves in north central Florida are now gone because of the freezes caused by this Global Warming, most of the yards still harbour a variety of fruit trees. Those of us growing up in the sixties also planted a bunch in our hippie days.

But here in Vermont everyone I know goes out every year to pick apples and blueberries. So it's not just Florida. I think cities might have it different because you have to purchase fruit in stores, but I also visited my family in North Carolina and we spent half the summer in the Cherry trees and Apple trees or under the grape arbor, eating hand to mouth.

Talk about addicted to sugar! No wonder.

It's a long jump from "HFCS in soft drinks is bad" to "fructose in fruit is bad". Still, either one is toxic in my eyes.

I bet even as we type, they're getting together the money to sponsor that HFCS study.... NOT!