This is a serious question. Because of the power of the media, we see the bad ones... again and again and again. In health circles, virtually every health circle other than Frugarians, Sugar and Fructose are villanized.
Yet people zealously defend the last bit of fruit in their diet like im suggesting to the pope that god does not exist(which I will gladly do given the chance)
Obviously the opinions of the HFCS producers over at Sweet Surprise should be ignored, but barring them, where are the positive studies, fructose is great for X. Fructose prevents Y. We NEED fructose for Z.
I understand that in very limited quantities, fructose is used preferentially to restore liver glycogen, but after that, it only causes AGE production among other presumed issues.
I say presumed, because every study done is flawed in some way and want to avoid the pure semantic arguments to focus on our health instead.
Snipped the Studies as Irrelevant, Google Fructose Studies if you want to see an epic list of Dangers that have been scientifically shown, regardless of the flaws of the studies.
- VERY IMPORTANT *
I havent read thru all of these studies. II did not post the following 20 pages which contain many many more negative studies and not 1 singular positive one. I have attempted to find any studies that found positive benefits of fructose, yet most of the studies above, even while many are animal, in vitro, or otherwise flawed, are repeated over and over again. No matter where you seem to look, all of the information is negative and scientifically biased AGAINST fructose.
Even HFCS industry, and "Sweet Surprise" is limited to, HFCS is no worse than standard sugar.... With their untold fortunes, even they cannot come up with positives for fructose.
I eat alot of flack for fully speaking up against fructose, so im laying out the gauntlet. Educate me. Educate Us, show us the SCIENCE, not opinion of how fructose is good.
Dont simply try to tear apart all of the bad studies. That only proves that youre good at dissembling studies. Show us SCIENCE where fructose is actually good above a very minimal amount.
I would LOVE to find that larger amounts of fructose are good for me and not going to hurt me in the LONG run. The Science I can find, ALL of the science I can find says otherwise above a very small quantity.
A study showing positives of fruit, does not make FRUCTOSE good either, it simply shows that the other beneficial chemicals, nutrients etc are beneficial, the problem with that argument, is that ALL of those compounds vital for life are available thru non fructose pathways.
Sway us with Science, not just opinion.
Dr. Kurt Harris did a very nice Carb Writeup where he addresses Fructose, just wanted to add a few quotes from it.:
In the case of fructose, we have a monosaccharide that has the same chemical formula and a caloric content equivalent to glucose, but is treated quite differently by the body because it has a different 3- dimensional structure.
2) Because fructose spends more time than glucose in the unstable and reactive open configuration, it can react with proteins in a chemical reaction known as the maillard reaction. This results in glycation – attachment of a sugar – to other molecules, especially proteins. As proteins can be important structurally or as enzymes, this can have pathologic consequences. These glycated compounds are known as advanced glycosylation end products – AGEs.
4) When there is fructose in excess of glucose, or even when there is a large amount of fructose with glucose, there is often malabsorption in the small bowel – this can lead to rapid fermentation by bacteria in the colon, or abnormal overgrowth of bacteria in the distal small bowel. I speculate that fructose malabsorption is actually a defense mechanism to keep the liver from being overwhelmed by this metabolic poison, and the fact that we have not evolved a mechanism to handle big-gulp doses of fructose to the small bowel indicates modern quantities are likely outside of our evolutionary experience – the EM2.
5) When fructose is absorbed, it goes via the portal vein directly to the liver, and the liver attempts to clear it completely so it cannot get into the general circulation. This is good, as fructose seems to be about 10 times more likely to cause glycation than glucose. Even small amounts of it can wreak havoc.
6) To keep fructose out of the general circulation, it must be immediately burned or stored as fat. Fructose is related to the spectrum of serious diseases known as NAFLD (non-alcoholic liver disease), including fatty liver and cirrhosis.
7) Excess fructose, chiefly via the liver volunteering to “taking one for the team” causes a variety of negative effects that are linked to pathologic insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, a general inflammatory state, and of course obesity.
8) Finally, fructose has no immediate effect on insulin release, but is linked to pathologic hyperinsulinemia via it’s effects on the liver. This is the exact opposite of glucose, which requires insulin to partition it when eaten, but for which there is no good evidence to relate it to chronic pathologic hyperinsulinemia.
(Note: This does not mean eating glucose is harmless once you have metabolic syndrome. You also have to be careful of large boluses of fat once your gallbladder is diseased. This doesn’t mean eating fat caused your gallstones, though - quite the opposite in fact.)
Why do we lump harmless starch and possibly toxic fructose together and say they are equivalent macronutrients? They seem to have very little in common metabolically. Who cares about the paper chemical formula?
How many human diet trials or animal trials have you seen that lump them together? How many that treat them as totally separate variables like they should?
