Is fruit making you fat?

Fructose has received something of a mixed press in recent years. A type of sugar found in food, such as fruit and honey, fructose also forms part of the sweetener high-fructose corn syrup.

Fructose is often recommended for people with diabetes, mainly because it has a very low glycemic index relative to other simple sugars. As a result, your body doesn't need to secrete a large amount of insulin when you eat fructose.

High-fructose corn syrup has served as a substitute sweetener for sucrose since the 1970's. According to some estimates, its consumption increased by more than 1,000% between 1970 and 1990, largely because soft drink manufacturers switched from using sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup.

Obesity has also increased dramatically over the same period, leading some authors to lay the blame squarely at the door of high-fructose corn syrup.

So, is fructose good or bad? Should you avoid fruit because of its fructose content? Does every last gram of high-fructose corn syrup need to be eliminated from your diet?

Fructose

Foods rich in carbohydrate are usually derived from plants. In fact, milk is probably the only food from animals that contains a significant amount of carbohydrate.

In the leaves of green plants, carbon dioxide, water, and the energy of the sun are used to form a type of sugar called glucose. That's where the word "carbohydrate" comes from. Carbo means "carbon," while hydrate refers to "water."

Fructose (also known as levulose) is made when plants rearrange the atoms in glucose. Fructose, along with glucose and galactose, is known as a monosaccharide. Some sugars, on the other hand, consist of pairs of sugars. They're called disaccharides.

The sugar in milk, for example, is known as lactose. It's a disaccharide consisting of glucose and galactose. Sucrose (table sugar) is made when fructose and glucose are joined together. When you see sugar listed on the nutrition label of a food item, the label is referring to these simple sugars.

The cells of your body can't use food such as bread or pasta. They can't even use a disaccharide like sucrose. Instead, they need glucose. To get this glucose, your digestive system has to turn carbohydrate into a monosaccharide.

Unlike some other monosaccharides, fructose is primarily metabolized by the liver. However, the metabolic fate of fructose depends in part on...

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