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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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