Philip J. Goscienski, M.D.
November 2011
What makes fructose such a prominent target of food experts? When we eat it in large amounts it raises blood pressure, causes fatty changes in the liver that can result in cirrhosis, increases fat accumulation and elevates blood levels of uric acid, which can lead to gout in susceptible individuals. Americans' high intake of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is considered by many nutritionists to be a major factor in the nation's epidemic of obesity, especially among children.
Although fructose is the main ingredient in HFCS, that's not very different from its presence in sucrose, which we know as table sugar. Most sucrose comes from sugar cane or sugar beets and it consists of an equal mixture of fructose and glucose. In other words sucrose contains 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. The body is able to use glucose for energy but it must fiddle with the fructose molecule in the liver in order to make it usable.
High-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. There's only about 5 percent more fructose in HFCS than there is in sucrose, so why all the fuss?
The real issue is that the total amount of sugar in the American diet has zoomed since the 1960s because HFCS is cheap and makes processed foods taste better. Another major factor is the increased consumption of soft drinks that are sweetened with HFCS. Added sugars account for nearly a quarter of the calories we eat every day. If those added sugars were to suddenly disappear and were not replaced by other sources of calories we wouldn't be facing many of the medical problems that threaten us.
The real danger to our health — and to that of the economy — doesn't come from fructose alone but from the inordinate amounts of all sugars that together with refined flour have made us the fattest people in history.
Eliminating sugar is probably the easiest dietary path to better health. Getting the population to stop eating grain-based products would be an enormous chore by comparison. Cutting back on salt and saturated fat would help too but not nearly as much.
Sugar substitutes seem like a reasonable alternative but besides the fact that they seldom taste as good there is concern among many persons that they raise the risk of cancer and other diseases even if there is no good evidence for those fears.
Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him at drphil@stoneagedoc.com.