The study is conducted in mouse and human immune cells in a dish, and the purported link is between HFCS and inflammation.
Its also not clear to me if the concentrations of fructose used in the study reflect the dynamic range of concentrations of fructose in your tissues during day-to-day life.
A diet high in fructose is not advisable for people with an autoimmune disease. One study did that of people with a large number of specific types of autoimmune disease that can be caused by high fructose foods. This study showed that one diet was associated with a higher incidence of these autoimmune diseases in those with large and consistent levels of fructose intake. For example, in those with low body weight you might find a higher fructose intake and thus an higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases. So, to help prevent those type of autoimmune diseases, you might need to lower your body weight and eat a low fructose diet that gives you less carbs and so on. You can find more information here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22991621
Question: Does this mean honey and high fructose corn syrup are approximately equally [1] unhealthy? Or is honey an anomaly/enigma [2] in this respect?
[1] Apparently honey contains ~40% fructose, which about the same as “HFCS42” (a standard 42% fructose corn syrup product).
[2] I ask this because I’ve read many claims that honey is among the healthiest forms of sugar, with many studies cited that show all sorts of health benefits of honey (at least versus table sugar or HFCS). Is this pseudoscientific bunk that I’ve been mislead to believe?
[1]
Honey is bad if you've got issues digesting fructose.
For someone with IBS, or another digestive issue, the FODMAP diet recommends no more than 1 teaspoon of honey with a meal (ie every 4 hours). The FODMAP diet tracks fructose-in-excess-of-glucose as that is one of the common triggers of digestive issues. Its not saying that honey is unhealthy, but rather honey causes issues for some folks.
It sounds to me like fruit itself is implicated, so honey certainly would be. My rule is, anything that tastes sweet is probably bad for me, but I have some digestive issues. I would like to do nothing but greens, oily fish and some roots to round out the calories, but I am weak willed.
This depends a great deal on the quality of honey. Most honey at the supermarket is adulterated [1]. If you can find raw, unfiltered honey, then it will contain additives such as pollen, beeswax, and parts of bees. The additives have nutritional value, yes, but the overwhelming majority of honey is the nutritional equivalent of simple syrup.
Probably the "best" sugar you can use is date sugar, which is just dried, ground-up dates. But if you really want to eat healthily, then you should eat plants instead of rich foods.
It’s not the source of the fructose that matters (at least not much). My autoimmune processes go into overdrive due to biome activity that is exacerbated by all sugars including carbs. The source of the sugar is of second order importance.
For anyone interested in a detailed explanation of fructose metabolism (and why it's bad for you), I'd highly recommend these two talks by Robert Lustig on the subject. The first one is about how the body reacts to fructose, and the second video is a follow-up that emphasizes how fructose has contributed to the obesity epidemic in the US and elsewhere.
Does fruit contain as much fructose today as it did 50, 100, 200 years ago? Or have we selectively bread the sweetest fruits to the point where monkeys cannot eat bananas?
Monkeys banned from eating bananas at Devon zoo
Zookeepers say the stereotypical food actually makes monkeys more aggressive, rots their teeth and can lead to diabetes
[...]
Zookeepers said the fruit grown and exported for human consumption have far higher levels of sugar than the ones monkeys would eat in the wild – to the point that it’s bad for their teeth and can lead to diabetes.
> Does fruit contain as much fructose today as it did 50, 100, 200 years ago?
Maybe due to selection of larger, sweeter fruit, yes. But processed food contains various sugar variants, including fructose (think "high fructose corn syrup") so fruit isn't the only (not even the main) source of fructose for many.
Lustig argues that the fiber in fruit is the reason fruit does not cause issues in primates where we strip the fiber by straining or most commonly using hfcs as a sweetener. It’s a good-to-great video and worth the watch though I do not have the background to critique it.
A half cup of Dole canned pineapple is 15g of sugar. Eating a half cup of fresh pineapple is 8g of sugar. Pineapple is higher in sugar that many fruits. A cup of raspberries is 3g of Fructose.
This is a little mixing of apples and oranges but the high fructose we tend to eat are much higher than primates that eat fruit.
Eating the equivalent amount of apples to HFCS is never going to have the same effect. Fiber content and other good stuff will completely remove the effects that you might see fructose isolate.
Raw fruit isn't a problem, not even for humans. Products where "sugar" is replaced by fructose or other, simpler sugar variants is. Various sugar substitutes are added to e.g. canned fruit in "juice" which is mostly some kind of sugar. Which lets marketing say "less sugar" ...
And "high fructose corn syrup" is ... almost pure fructose. Which the human liver can only process a limited amount per day.
Anecdote: a young guy in Freiburg (Germany) got Covid recently and as a result lost his sense of taste afterwards. Now he isn't interested in fast food any more as everything tasty "bland" and can "easily" eat vegetables which he disliked before, even broccoli or Brussels sprouts. Which made him loose more than 50 pounds. Don't get this wrong, it's not an incentive to get Covid, but an example of the effects of abstaining from fast food and soft drinks.
Primates also eat fermented fruits which have enzymes that convert to something more digestible. By going for the cleanest best looking fruits/foods we have decreased the diversity of our gut bacteria which increasing the things people are allergic to.
Food is more properly understood in totality than merely as isolated nutrients. However, it is easier to design scientific studies that focus on isolated nutrients.
Whole fruit contains vitamins, minerals, fiber, and significant amounts of water. Whole fruit contains intact plant cell walls. It's very important to eat intact plant cell walls, but that's difficult to determine from studies of isolated nutrients. Because of the bulkiness caused by water and fiber in whole fruit, it's difficult to eat large amounts. For example, it takes about four oranges to make a glass of orange juice. Most people would not eat four oranges, but most people could easily drink 1 or more glasses of juice.
The wild fruit eaten by primates has less sugar and more fiber compared to fruit cultivated by humans. Human cultivated foods, including plants and livestock, are much richer compared to wild plants and animals, having more fat, sugar, starch, and calories in general, than what could evolve in the absence of pest control.
Humans have evolved quite differently than other primates. We have a rare ability to digest large amounts of starch, a capability shared almost exclusively with rats and pigs. It's difficult to compare our diets.
Primates consume significant amounts of foliage (leaves and such). You probably should too, green leaves are very excellent for your health.
I guess my first thought is: the amount of fructose in fruit is small relative to the amount in, say, a cola. Also, fiber might mitigate the insulin response. Also, we aren't eating fruits found in the wild (which is the relevant ecological context for this discussion). We have selectively bred fruits to be bigger and sweeter.
I wonder if the enzyme uricase has anything to do with it. While reading about gout, I read that uricase is not found in humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons but is found in other primates. Apparently uricase is found in most animals except the above. And somehow uricase is also related to fructose processing.
I was told that most fruits have a comparable amount of fructose and glucose and that eating excess fructose is what causes diseases and autoimmune reactions.
There's no big sugar behind it. You can quite easily see that a bunch of studies are on isolates, the Japanese he mentions eat much less calories and more fructose as a percentage of calories, etc.
There's just too much inaccuracies and outright misrepresentation to fit the narrative
Ah, another meaningless nutrition epidemiology study done on rats and ex vivo cells in a dish that tells us precisely nothing about how the health of actual humans is affected (if at all).
It's further confirmation that the highly addictive toxic white powder pushed on the public by evil cartels we should really worry about is not cocaine, but sugar. Do you drink soda? Put sugar in your coffee? Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem.
I wonder if we’ll ever see HFCs regulated like tobacco or alcohol. It’s another one of those epic scandals by huge corporations that used propaganda to sway public opinion...and now we’re left with an obesity epidemic.
If we (in the US) could end corn subsidies, use of HFCS in food production would probably fall naturally as other sweeteners were able to compete again for the cheapest sweetener.
It's easier for people to believe that HFCS is the devil than to change their habits, which include consuming 45 gallons of soda contributing to 60lbs of sugar consumed per year. The average american consumes over 300 calories per day of just sugar. 17 teaspoons per day. Just imagine scooping that out of a bag. That's never going to be ok whether it's HFCS, table sugar, or honey.
Moving from HFCS to table sugar wouldn't change those numbers at all... but if they can blame HFCS it'll ease their guilt that they might be personally responsible for the health consequences of their own diet.
Edit: keep in mind, this is ADDED sugars only. It doesn't include natural sugars, like those found in juice, fruits, etc. The average american consumers an incredible amount of sugar.
> Sugar derived from cane and beet and honey are exactly as bad for your health as high-fructose corn syrup.
While equivalent (calorically) amounts of other sugars certainly isn't good for you, there is a growing consensus that fructose (and thus HFCS, and probably honey, though I'm not aware of studies to the latter effect) is subtly different enough to be worse for most people over the long term, even when taking into consideration that less is needed because it is sweeter.
The ratio of fructose to glucose seems to be one important factor, another is whether the fructose and glucose are bound together into sucrose (it doesn't seem like this paper addresses the latter point).
HFCS and honey both have a higher amount of fructose than glucose, and contain these components mostly in 'free' form, sugarcane and beets produce mostly sucrose, in which the ratio of fructose to glucose is equal and the sugars are mostly bound together into sucrose.
Although the effect of these differences is subtle, other research suggests that chronic consumption of fructose in free form causes changes in insulin response that in turn are responsible for both reduced satiation and weight gain (assuming sufficient calories). Caloric restriction can counteract the weight gain, but not the other changes.
The mechnisms for this have not been entirely clear. This paper describes some changes in cellular preference for some metabolic pathways over others that among other things in turn promote inflammatory responses. As a layman it is tempting to 'connect the dots', as inflammation is (generally, and indirectly) implicated (by other research) in various conditions, but this paper by itself doesn't actually do that. Though it does seem like an important step forward to doing so.
There are a whole host of questions this opens up, like "is this inflammatory response observable in particular tissues (pancreatic, white vs. brown fat, etc.)?", "how is this inflammatory response linked to changes in insulin response (in various tissues)?", "what else does this change in preference for particular metabolic pathways affect?", "what other alternate metabolic pathways might be affected by differences in nutrient ratios, or by the presence or absence of other nutrients?", "Does this help explain the difference in effect of consuming some foods in processed form (eg. Eating fruit vs. drinking juice)?", etc.
Intriguing and suggestive questions to be sure, but as yet unanswered (particularly by this paper in isolation).
So what is a good “low fructose” (or otherwise healthier) sugar that is recommended over table sugar and HFCS?
I had thought honey was generally regarded as a healthier form of sugar, but now I’m a little confused, since it appears to also be fairly high in fructose (~40%) according to this article:
I follow Robert Lustig's lectures; he talked about this stuff since 2009 and it's public - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM . The way I interpret the advice is as follows: Eat as much whole fruit as you want (but you'll get tired of it quickly). Limit refined sugars to about 30 grams per day (soda, candy, yogurt, jam, cake, etc.; this means reading labels carefully). In theory you can go out and eat as much glucose (a.k.a. dextrose) as you want, but this sounds dumb so don't do it. Embrace eating fat; it is not the enemy. Eat fiber like vegetables. Let your body tell you when you're full (which fructose disrupts).
Actually HFCS are entirely a product of the US Sugar program, which among other things restricts importation of sugar to drive up the price of domestic sugar. In the 1980s this made HFCS from milling corn into a cheaper liquid substitute for sugar. Thats when the soft drinks switched over. HFCS historically cost more to make than sugar but is made competitive only by govt intervention in the sugar market. If the US had market access to global sugar HFCS would not be competitive, Americans pay 5x more for sugar which creates the opening for HFCS.
> Our results have highlighted the metabolic plasticity of human monocytes in response to fructose exposure and have elucidated the metabolic mechanisms supporting fructose-induced inflammation.
They are proposing a particular explanation for how fructose over-exposure can lead to inflammation.
Fructose promotes triglycerides and the formation of these fatty acids, and is linked to heart disease. The amount of fructose in your diet affects your body weight. The amount of sugar in your diet also affects your body weight. These are all factors that influence the type of fatty acids in your body that are involved in fat metabolism and heart disease. For example, the amount of fructose affects how quickly you start to store fat in your body. So, if you eat enough refined sugars to get more saturated fat, you will have more of the "carbohydrate" in your body. So, to get more saturated fat, you would need to eat more fructose. So, if you eat too much refined sugar and no fiber, your body will be less able to store energy.
HFCS is just about the worst food ingredient out there that is present in foods in amounts larger than a couple of milligrams. Maybe trans-fats are worse, but those have been largely phased out. In 2009, sampled foods with HFCS had detectable levels of mercury, though corn refiners claim this is fixed and due to an outdated refining process that used mercury.
Can someone explain to me how this doesn't imply that I should completely remove fructose from the list of ingredients in food I am willing to consume?
Table sugar is entirely made up of sucrose. A polymer which is composed of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule. Fructose is also in most fruit sugars. Honey is one of the worst offenders from a natural source. Finally corn syrup is the absolute worst.
Avoiding refined sugars in general is a good thing, but removing fructose completely would require not eating any fruits or berries either. The rule of thumb is that whole fruits and berries are okay if you get the plant fiber along with the juice and don't eat too many. Fruit juice drinks and refined sugars should be avoided for sure. Especially corn syrup, honey, and maple syrup.
Right now I only use refined sugar to feed yeast in baking breads. Even then, it doesn't take much. I don't drink fruit juice and only occasionally eat whole fruit as a treat. That seems to work okay so far for me, so take it as you will.
I eat a lot of honey, and am a huge fan of maple syrup. I love maple syrup, but I eat it in moderation. I eat it in smaller portions of about half cup daily but can have as much as I want. It's good on it's own as an energy source, and can be used as a natural sweetener. Also, I like to eat my whole grain breads with maple syrup as well. It adds flavor to them, so maybe I should add some! It's easy to eat, and is easy to make with an electric mixer, and it tastes great. So for me that's a win.
That is a lot of pure carbs and no protein or fat. All of your comments seem to be suggesting this diet. "Whole grain" is the only healthy part of your comment.
Honey in small quantities is probably just fine like table sugar or maple syrup. But keep in mind that it's 4:3 ratio of fructose to glucose. In addition is has a ton of minerals and organic compounds thought to be beneficial. But if you drink it in your tea every day you will be taking in a lot of fructose.
The thing with honey is that it is rare and seasonal in nature. Once a month/season/year is probably highly beneficial, daily is likely to be a slow suicide.
My point is availability doesn’t follow. That it has a functionally infinite shelf life means that the seasonality of production is not relevant. I can go to my big box grocery store and buy several honeys that are produced within 50 miles of my Midwestern city. I can buy several more that are produced elsewhere. Year round.
I don't know what else to add. You've gone too far off the path. It's pretty simple what OP wrote. Makes a person think about nature, evolution, adaption, is-this-healthy. Ok?
You know what it makes me think? You're chasing extremely marginal gains in life expectancy.
Yes, there's a good chance that in the caveman days I would only have had honey in rare circumstance when I found a good beehive and had time to process it. It would have been consumed fairly quickly unless I had extremely advanced levels of time preference and self control.
I also would probably have been dead by my mid-30s.
Now, I can get high quality, delicious, dark local honey - a year's supply at a tablespoon a day, more than you need - for less than what the average HN poster makes in an hour.
I don't eat that much of it, usually just use it as a maple syrup substitute for a nice weekend breakfast, and should be able to live until my 80s as long as I keep in shape with some basic exercise on a regular basis.
> You've gone too far off the path.
What path, friend? Where is the path? Where are the markings, and who put them there?
A person says, "honey seems like a rare seasonal treat in nature for most humans. Should we be eating a lot of it?". Same question gets asked about soy, gluten, beef, etc. It's more of a nutrition observation. It just seems like you missed the whole spirit of the thought.
I don't know what else to add. You've gone too far off the path. It's pretty simple what OP wrote. Makes a person think about nature, evolution, adaption, is-this-healthy. Ok?
I think most Americans are doing just fine with high fructose diets. However, there have been a lot of studies coming out, that seem to be suggesting there is some danger of obesity after a certain low carbohydrate diet or skipping carbohydrates altogether, as these diets tend to spike blood sugar rapidly. The most interesting is a study in humans, that showed a significant increase in blood glucose when carbohydrates were restricted . However, the more I look at it the more I feel like the results are definitely not true for me. I still get a pretty nice feeling in my mouth after eating sugar but I don't notice much of a difference in taste, taste just seems dull, bland, sour, and nothing much else, other than I don't feel I need as many carbohydrates as I did before.
Well, they're prepared for a famine, and since you can live till your late 60s or later while being horrendously out of shape, "fine" is a relative thing, no?
How in the world would eating less carbs lead to an increase in blood sugar? You must have something backwards. Eating more protein and fat instead of carbs should certainly lead to a decrease in blood sugar.
Yup! So enjoy them! They are one of my favorite treats. If you don't crush them and only drink the juice and you should be fine. Also don't eat more than 2 cups in a single sitting or drench them in sugar and you should be fine. They are also great with heavy whipping cream.
In addition to your comment, Sugar/Sucrose can be processed by your entire body. Fructose can only be processed by your liver. Consuming too much Fructose (easy to do), is not a good thing for your Liver.
Sugar is a bonded pair of fructose and glucose. In the stomach an enzyme breaks the bond and both sugars are absorbed. Glucose can be used by any cell but fructose is processed by the liver. It seems that fructose is what is disturbing blood and metabolism.
I actually watched an interesting video on this last night by Adam Ragusea, who hosts a cooking channel and likes to dabble in the food science side of things on occasion - https://youtu.be/DEKrfvgPGDY
It looks to be the case that in the case of HFCS high ratios of Fructose to Glucose can cause issues because of excess free Fructose.
If the balance between the two is maintained, things may be less problematic.
HFCS is a misnomer. It's just 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Whereas sucrose is exactly 50% fructose and 50% glucose. HFCS is a health problem, but not not more so than sugar already.
Balancing free fructose does not matter because by eating starch, you are already intaking much more glucose than fructose.
High-fructose corn syrup is not a misnomer. It is in contrast to ordinary corn syrup which consists almost entirely of glucose along with smaller amounts its oligo-saccharides (e.g. maltose, etc). Corn syrup generally contains no fructose.
To be precise, HFCS-55 is 55% fructose. Commonly used varieties of HFCS include HFCS-42, HFCS-55, and HFCS-90, containing the percentages of fructose indicated by the number, though HFCS-55 is the most commonly used form due to its near-equivalency in sweetness to sucrose.
The amount of free fructose should not be dismissed so readily, as starch requires breakdown into glucose via amylase enzymes, thus "flattening the curve" of its concentration in the blood. Free fructose is rapidly absorbed and the resultant relatively high concentrations induce specific negative effects in the body:
"The activity of fructokinase (KHK) is different from the other hexokinases by virtue of the fact that it induces transient ATP depletion in the cell. The mechanism is due to the fact that fructokinase (KHK) rapidly phosphorylates fructose to fructose-1-phosphate resulting in marked ATP depletion. The activity of fructokinase (KHK) is not subject to feed-back inhibition such as is the case for glucose metabolism, thus the ATP depletion is profound. Since the majority of fructose metabolism occurs in the liver, the effects of this ATP depletion are exerted on numerous important hepatic metabolic processes." (https://themedicalbiochemistrypage.org/fructose-metabolism/)
Furthermore:
"In contrast to the anorexigenic effect of hypothalamic glucose metabolism, the metabolism of fructose in the brain exerts an orexigenic effect. ... Since hypothalamic fructose metabolism bypasses this important regulatory step its metabolism rapidly depletes ATP in the hypothalamus. ... Therefore, although glucose and fructose utilize the same signaling pathway to control food intake they act in an inverse manner and have reciprocal effects on the level of hypothalamic malonyl-CoA." (ibid.)
Which is to say, free fructose promotes hunger while starch/glucose metabolism stimulates satiety.
I think you missed the point, moreover the article you cited actually supports the parent comment (note the italicized sentences).
> However, diets containing large amounts of sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, or fructose alone, overwhelm the ability of the small intestine to metabolize it all and under these conditions a significant amount of fructose is then metabolized by the liver and to a lesser extent by other organs such as skeletal muscle. It should be pointed out that the difference between the amount of fructose available from sucrose obtained from cane or beet sugars is not significantly less than that from corn syrup. Corn syrup is somewhat improperly identified as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) giving the impression that it contains a large amount of fructose. However, whereas the fructose content of sucrose is 50% (since it is a pure disaccharide of only glucose and fructose), the content in HFCS is only 55% and in many cases is actually only 40-45% fructose. The reason that corn syrup (which is all glucose to begin with) is labeled as HFCS is because the glucose extracted from corn starch is enzymatically treated to convert some of the glucose to fructose. This is done in order to make the sugar sweeter which is why it is particularly popular in the food industry. Therefore, any disorder and/or dysfunction (see below), attributed to the consumption of fructose, can be manifest whether one consumes cane or beet sugar, HFCS, or pure fructose such as in honey and most fruits.
I suppose that depends on what you believe the point is.
The opening assertion was that high-fructose corn syrup is a misnomer. This not a historically accurate statement. Disregarding any erroneous conflation of high-fructose corn syrup with corn syrup (of the only type that existed prior to the invention of what is termed high-fructose corn syrup), high-fructose corn syrup is most assuredly "high" in that it contains a "high" percentage of fructose (40-90%) in comparison with the previously existing corn syrup which contain 0% fructose.
It is spurious to hold to a vague definition of "high" that can only apply to concentrations somewhere in excess of 90%, lest we find ourselves unable to refer to water containing 0.5% lead by weight as having "high" levels of lead.
That said, I concur with the assertion that significant consumption of fructose in any of the commonly available forms, including as a component of sucrose, that do not substantially moderate the rate of its absorption (e.g. such as a dietary fiber-based structural matrix) carry an associated negative health risk.
It is accurate to say that sucrose becomes the equivalent of "HFCS-50" upon contact with the enzymes which line the inside of the small intestine.
As someone with IBS, Fructose in excess of Glucose is THE issue.
The FODMAP diet (peer reviewed, currently the gold standard for IBS diets) is about reducing the fructose-in-excess-ofglucose. Only a teaspoon honey at time, but you can eat maple syrup. Greatly reduced consumption of stone fruits.
Its known that some IBS cases are caused when someone does not breakdown fructose in their small intestine, so the fructose then ferments in the large intestine. You want some fermentation in your gut, but not too much!
It doesn't really have anything to do with food.
To learn more about this study see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15571466
Cognitive Benefits of a High Fructose Diet: I find that a diet high in simple sugars is beneficial in several aspects for cognitive performance, especially when compared to a standard diet. For example, one of the largest studies ever found that a high fructose diet was associated with an enhanced cognitive performance of young women. So, I recommend the high fructose diet to any young women who have mild to moderate cognitive problems but want to improve their memory. You can find more information here: http://cognitive.ucsd.edu/m/mzwg/cognitive-performance.html
Its also not clear to me if the concentrations of fructose used in the study reflect the dynamic range of concentrations of fructose in your tissues during day-to-day life.