Fructose and sugars

Here's an update: We saved up and bought nice running shoes from a running store. I've gone twice now. Yesterday, I took surf stuff and running stuff and drove down to the parking lot at the south end of Ocean Beach and watched the sloppy surf for 10 minutes before deciding that a run would be better. Ran two miles on the paved pathway and ran/walked (mostly walked) back on the sand past the thousands of broken sand dollars and dead-crab pieces 2 miles back. Pleased with myself, I reported this to Emily this morning and asked her if she'd been running this morning. She tells me yes, and where she went. I mapped it out to 5.5 miles. Haha. I tell her she HAS to do a 5k this weekend during a family reunion. She doesn't like it when I tell her she HAS to do something. She says, no she doesn't :-) (I gotta figure out how to manipulate this to my advantage: "You HAVE TO stop giving me back rubs!!")

The other day, my mother-in-law asks me what's the deal with High Fructose Corn Syrup. Some friends of theirs just visited the mid-west where they saw posters and signs and billboards everywhere touting the greatness of HFCS (in response to the negative attention it's been getting) sponsored by the corn growers associations.

I only knew of speculation and personal preference so I decided to look it up. Starting with wikipedia, I checked a couple of the sources and ended up spending some time at the Journal of Nutrition's site which had lots of articles on HFCS.

Here's the lowdown (probably too much low-down, but consider yourselves educated), there's lots of sugars in the world and we can use lots of them for energy. The most abundant is glucose. Stick a bunch of glucoses together into various chains and you get different things: plant and animal starches (which we can digest), wood/fiber (which only bacteria can digest), and lots more. Starches are blobs of stored energy consisting of chains of glucose, the human body holds enough for about a day, or an hour of hard exercising. Once it runs out, it uses other energy sources, likes fats and protein (there's always a mix of all of them being used and made, but it's primarily like this). Glucose is very highly regulated by the body.

Fructose is another abundant simple sugar. Before glucose can be used, it must be converted by enzymes into fructose. Fructose is found naturally in lots of places. It's very sweet tasting (much sweeter than pure glucose), probably because it is such an immediately usable energy source that the body is designed to take any fructose it can get (being a body developed in times when food was scarcer and harder to come by). Glucose is easily missed by the liver and takes a couple circulations through the body to get all picked up, whereas fructose all gets picked up on the first pass, generally (I'm sure it can be overloaded at some point).

What people have found in studying fructose vs. glucose is when there is lots of fructose in the diet, there are higher amounts of fats and cholesterol (which does lots of things in relation to the processing and storage of fat) in the blood. This gives cause to believe that high fructose diets have a strong relationship to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. (The authors of one of the studies said that the fructose levels from fruits and vegetables is not high enough to do this in a normal diet)

This would make sense: "Lots of immediate usable energy, but can't use it right now? Store it!! Save what you can!! You never know when the famine will hit!"

That's what the body does.

Now, what exactly is High Fructose Corn Syrup? Plain ol' regular Corn syrup comes from (can you guess it?) CORN!! It's nearly all glucose. Using enzymes and chemicals (on the scale we make it, I'm sure it qualifies for the title of "Industrial Processes" as scary as that sounds) they can convert corn syrup to 90% fructose, which is then used to mix with pure corn syrup to varying strengths of fructose concentrations. In most foods you buy, its in a 55% glucose to 45% fructose combo of free sugars, ready for bodily use.

Compare that to cane, beet, and other plants that give us normal table sugar, aka "sucrose". Sucrose is a two-sugar combo with one glucose, one fructose stuck together. When broken down to simple sugar form, it's pretty close to HFCS chemically. But, importantly, the body can regulate how much sucrose it will absorb and how much of it it will break down. There's quite a bit more control over the body's use of sucrose. It also tastes quite a bit different, and there's some evidence that the brain can distinguish caloric intake and satisfaction based off of the type of sugar ingested. (I would think with all the other things the body can do, distinguishing the fine details of important energy consumption would be easy). Granted, lots of sucrose isn't much better, but it is at least significant.

I thought it was funny that the wikipedia article described "opposing studies" done that show HFCS has the same effects as sucrose and shouldn't be treated any differently or receive negative press. The study cited in the article, and elsewhere by the corn associations, is not a study, but a "review" done by "White Research Associates" or something like that, written by one man with the last name White basically stating the chemical sameness between HFCS and sucrose. Sure, it's true, but at least slightly misleading and to me it seems purely a marketing ploy to help out the corn association dispel the hate for HFCS.


As an extra note on the topic of sugars: lactose is the sugar in milk. It's a glucose and a galactose sugar stuck together. Not the body's first choice for energy and cells are not normally in a state to use it, but lactose in the cells actually binds onto DNA and changes what the cell is going to make. So when there's enough lactose the DNA gets scanned and churns out the enzymes to use galactose and lactose. Way cool, huh? This makes for easy study of genes: stick the gene you want to study onto the lactose-using gene, stuff it into a bacteria, and feed it only lactose. When the lactose-using gene gets read and enzymes made, the extra genes stuck to it also get read and their proteins/enzymes get made too. Then analyze the proteins and figure out what the gene does. People and ethnicities who historically didn't have dairy in their diets tend to be lactose-intolerant, meaning the gene for using lactose as energy is faulty (this gives the bacteria in your gut lots of sugar and they cause lots of gases and digestive troubles)

Also, malt, like in barley malt, or malted drinks, comes from maltose (or did maltose get named for the malting process??) is two glucoses stuck together and is basically plant starch with some of the breaking down done for you.