Not So Sweet
Jul 31st, 2005 at 11:44 am by Susie
One more study pointing to fructose:
Another study finds that high consumption of soft drinks and other sweetened beverages contributes to obesity. But this study, conducted in mice, suggests that one form of natural sweetener — fructose — may be especially likely to encourage weight gain.
In the study, researchers at the University of Cincinnati allowed mice to freely consume either plain water or fructose-sweetened water and soft drinks.
The mice that drank the fructose-sweetened water and soft drinks gained weight, even though they took in fewer calories from solid food.
By the end of the study, the mice that consumed fructose-sweetened beverages had 90 percent more body fat than the mice that consumed water only.
And yet, Big Cola (the single biggest fructose delivery system) continues to make inroads into public schools, and thus our children.
Is this regular fructose or the high fructose corn syrup kind?
I gave up drinking Coca-Cola last year after reading a Japanese study which detailed a syndrome where type-2 diabetes emerged in young (
no one expects the corn lobby!!
I keep trying to imagine pop machines in schools. Our school would never have allowed it back in the Dark Ages.
I have always thought the supposed debacle of “New Coke” was actually a cunning plot, because it resulted in bringing back “Old Coke,” but with fructose substituted for sugar, thus saving millions for the company.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. More and more evidence piles up as we pile on the pounds. I’m convinced it’s related to the food supply in some way, no doubt multiple causes (including lack of exercise, of course) but many linked to processed foods and the prevalence of sugar in just about everything!
I finally gave up table sugar and soda with sugar last year. I dropped ten pounds without doing anything else.
Zuzu: fructose is a specific chemical structure of sugar, one of the “simple” sugars because it has only one carbon ring. “High-fructose” corn syrup just has a high proportion of fructose-type sugar among the many different kinds of sugars found in the syrup.
The real point about simple sugars is that some of them can be absorbed without any digestion. This doesn’t matter if you don’t eat much of them, as in an apple, but a whole slug, such as you get in a can of cola is another matter.
The ones I feel sorry for are the mice. They didn’t even do this stupid stuff by choice.
Gov Rell has the highest approval rating of any governor in the 50 states. Not really a surprise, given the jail time now being served by her corrupt Republican predecessor. Still, in this story, we see the effects of a body politic bent on popularity contests. Gov Rell is, undoubtedly, a nice lady. The Republican Party ‘gets this’: Put a smiling face on the executive in charge and the media, the voters, the people in general will ‘feel good’ and ‘give you a pass’ on a whole lot of stuff, including poisoning our children at school with coke in the name of shareholder value.
I read about that — it’s because fructose is metabolized partly as regular sugar (via insulin and converted to blood sugar) and partly by the liver, where it’s turned directly into fat.
Here’s my theory — if you think about it it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Most fruits would have been available during nice weather (spring thru fall), so if the body can store then the fat will be available as energy during the lean winter season.
So we should keep drinking Coke(tm) and hibernate?
I switched from Gatorade to seltzer about a month and seven pounds ago.