The sweetest and most harmful sugar is fructose
Is fructose the new enemy of humanity?
Vladimir Fradkin, Deutsche Welle
The food industry is increasingly adding sugar to its products – primarily fructose. But fructose in the form of food additives, unlike fructose in sweet berries and fruits, can cause serious harm to health.
Overweight has long been considered an inevitable companion of civilization. Indeed, in almost all developed countries, the number of people suffering from obesity and related ailments such as diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases is steadily increasing. Many experts have already started talking about the obesity epidemic that has engulfed the population of Western countries, including children. Experts in the field of nutrition, especially American ones, for many years laid all the blame for this alarming situation on fats, primarily animal fats. Therefore, they began to be decisively expelled from all products, including those where they should be, as they say, by definition. As a result, low-fat cream, low-fat sour cream, low-fat cheeses and even low-fat butter appeared on supermarket shelves. In appearance, color and consistency, these products are indistinguishable from traditional food products, but they are much inferior in taste. As for the health-improving effect, it never came: there were no fewer overweight people and the whole bouquet of concomitant ailments.
Fats were replaced by sugarsNow, apparently, American doctors have found a new enemy of humanity – sugar.
However, this time the researchers' argument looks more logical and convincing than when it came to fats. The article under the provocative title "The Poisonous Truth about sugar" was published in the authoritative scientific journal Nature. However, this does not mean any sugar, but fructose, that is, fruit or fruit sugar. And not even any fructose. One of the authors of the article, Professor Robert H. Lustig, pediatrician and endocrinologist, head of the Center for Combating Obesity in Children and Adolescents at the University of California at San Francisco, explains: "We are talking about added sugar, sugar that the food industry today mixes with its products – soft drinks, semi-finished products, ready-made culinary products. He mixes it allegedly in order to improve the taste, in fact – to increase sales. This is the main problem."
Over the past 50 years, sugar consumption in the world has tripled. Today, manufacturers add it to almost every conceivable and unimaginable food products. Another author of an article in the journal Nature, Professor Claire Brindis, pediatrician, head of the Center for Global Reproductive Medicine and director of the Institute for the Study of Health Policy at the University of California, San Francisco, says: "If you look at the list of ingredients of bread sold in America, sugar is increasingly found there. Sauces, ketchup, and many other products used to have no sugar, but today it is there. That is, the excessive presence of sugars is characteristic not only for lemonades and other drinks of this kind, but also for many other types of food."
Fructose is the sweetest and most harmful sugarAll this has an extremely deplorable effect on the health of the population, the researcher emphasizes: "Professionals cannot but be alarmed by the fact that, according to the UN, today more people in the world suffer from overweight than from malnutrition.
I see it this way: America has been too successful in spreading bad habits around the world."
In addition, if earlier the food industry added mainly sucrose to products, now it is increasingly being replaced with fructose. Sucrose is the most common sugar, cane or beet, it is a disaccharide, that is, it consists of two monosaccharides – fructose and glucose. Once in the body, sucrose is quickly broken down into glucose and fructose. Fructose is the sweetest of sugars, 1.5 times sweeter than sucrose and 3 times sweeter than glucose, which allows food processors to achieve the same taste effects with less substance. However, the problem is that fructose is absorbed in a completely different way than glucose, which is a universal source of energy for the body. Since fructose is found in almost all sweet berries and fruits, it would seem that there can be no danger from it. But this is not the case at all, says Robert Lustig: "When sugar is found in natural fruits, you consume it along with plant fibers. These ballast substances, although they themselves are not digested in the intestine, regulate the process of assimilation of sugars and, thereby, the level of sugar in the blood. Vegetable fibers are a kind of antidote, they prevent an overdose of fructose in the body." The only trouble is that the food industry adds fructose in its pure form to its products, without accompanying ballast substances.
Tobacco, alcohol and... fructoseAs a result, excess fructose becomes a serious risk factor for health, emphasizes Professor Lustig: "The metabolism of fructose in the body is very different from, say, glucose metabolism.
Rather, it resembles the metabolism of alcohol, and therefore an excess of fructose can cause ailments typical of alcoholism – diseases of the liver and cardiovascular system. Fructose enters directly into the liver and can very seriously disrupt its function. As a result, this often leads to serious diseases such as metabolic syndrome."
Metabolic syndrome is an excessive increase in the mass of visceral (that is, internal) fat, a decrease in the sensitivity of peripheral tissues to insulin, a violation of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, an increase in arterial blood pressure. According to Professor Lustig, today three–quarters of the entire US health budget goes to the treatment of non-communicable ailments - obesity, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and fructose added to food plays a very significant role in their development. Therefore, researchers advocate equating it with alcohol and tobacco. True, fructose does not cause dependence, but it is almost ubiquitous today, so it is simply unrealistic to avoid its consumption. According to American scientists, fructose should first of all be excluded from the list of safe food additives. This will deprive the industry of the right to add it to any products and in any quantity.
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01.03.2012