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It seems war on fructose has been officially declared.

This video by Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology, currently being linked to and / or embedded all over the blogosphere, explains in details to any who like health tips they can understand how fructose, a substitute to sugar and fat used by the food industry over the last 30 years, quite simply ruined public health.

It lasts 90 minutes, so if you’re in a hurry here is what it boild down to.

- Fructose is found in fruit. That doesn’t make fruit bad for your health. Like all things, fructose is benign when it is taken in reasonable amounts. If it came only from fruit, daily intake would be about 15 grams. Since it is being used as a sweetener, or a fat substitute to make low fat foods pallatable (read: it is EVERYWHERE), daily intake in western countries has surpassed 100 grams.

So do not react to this video or article by banning fruit, while continuing with the processed food that represents 85% of fructose intake. Keep the fruit, read industrial food labels and stay off anything that has fructose and syrup on it, unless it is largely compensated by fiber. Sucrose is 1/2 glucose and 1/2 fructose so don’t fall for the wording trick.

The idea being that if fructose enriched foods stop selling, they will no longer be made.

So why is fructose bad for your health?

Watching the video is the best way to understand this, but for those of you that are in a rush, I’ll do my best to break it own quickly. Run the video though, it will increase view counts (run it all the way and it will increase interest rating). Rate it 5 stars and you’ve done all you can to help make it a Youtube hit.

- Zero insulinic response. Insulin response causes leptin to be secreted, which is the satiety hormone that tells your brain it’s had enough. You don’t want high and sudden insulin spikes that cause addiction to sugar (except the occasional cheat that restores full leptin secretion), but you do not want zero insulin either (you stay hungry and keep on eating).

- Highly efficient sweetener – this increases the psychological addiction to sugar, but also hides the taste of nutrients that are being added to keep us hungry or thirsty (salt), and eating / drinking (buying) more calories.

- Fructose can only be metabolized by the liver, while every cell in your body can metabolize glucose. The problem being that hepatic metabolism leads to:

    – de novo lipogenesis (creation of fatty acids that are stored in fat, but also pollutes the muscle cells, causing resistance to insulin). Fructose metabolization creates fat!

    - Creates the Low Density Lipoprotein (LDL). Its low density enables it to find its way into the permeable vascular walls, thus thickening and hardening vascular and coronary vessels, which leads to cardio-vascular disease. The good fat (High Density) cannot do that.

   – These effects are similar to those of alcohol, hence Lustig’s affirmation that fructose is “like beer without the buzz” (updated in response to stenbj’s comment below).

Cheap and stable prices – This explains why it is all over the place. Fructose costs 1/2 what sugar costs and isn’t subject to price variations sugar cane was when it was our primary sweetener (geopolitics / speculation).

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