What would you do for science?
If you were an early twentieth-century explorer in the Antarctic, you might have to eat your own huskies.
If you were astronaut, you might have to drink your own urine.
If, on the other hand, you were part of a recent study conducted by the University of Texas, all you had to do was drink soft drinks.
Sounds like fun, but the researchers actually had a serious purpose: to determine whether fructose contributes to the accumulation of body fat (a process which the boffins call lipogenesis).
Of course, it doesn’t take a scientist to tell you that fructose—which packs 4 calories per gram like other carbohydrates—can definitely make you fat if you eat too much of it.
But what’s interesting about this study is that body fat increased twice as fast among the subjects who drank a high-fructose beverage compared with the subjects whose drink contained only glucose. (Subjects who drank a 50-50 mixture of fructose and glucose showed an intermediate result.)
Even more bad news: Both the 50-percent and the 75-percent fructose drinks were associated with up to 29 percent higher blood triglyceride levels—an important marker for cardiovascular risk.
This study may put a crimp in the Corn Refiners Association’s recent efforts to whitewash the reputation of this ubiquitous sweetener.
What It Means for You
But what should you do with this information?
First of all, it’s worth noting that the University of Texas study had only 6 subjects. Other researchers will need to confirm these results before we can say for sure that fructose is really more fattening than other sweeteners.
In the meantime, the bottom line is that all sugars—whether they come from cane, beets, or corn—are far too prevalent in the American diet. In fact, sugar consumption has increased by one-third since the 1940s, and the average American consumes about 140 pounds of sugar each year.
Like salt, sugar is popular with food manufacturers because it’s cheap and tasty. Unfortunately for us, sugar is an empty food that adds large numbers of calories that most of us don’t need, without adding the vitamins, minerals, fiber, phytochemicals, and oligosaccharides that we do need.
Even honey, which enjoys an enviable reputation as an “all-natural” sweetener, is largely devoid of nutritional value. Honey does contain a few more minerals than corn syrup does, but that’s not saying much. You’d have to eat over 7 cups of honey to reach the RDA for manganese—that’s over 7,000 calories worth of simple carbohydrates, and you’d still fall short of the RDA for every nutrient except one!
So make it a goal to cut back on high fructose corn syrup—but don’t substitute other sugars in its place. Instead, cultivate a taste for a range of flavors, not just the sweet and salty ones that have become the mainstay of the American palate.
