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Home :: Lose
Fat
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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