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The science of sugar
mere_immortal
So tasty!Registered User regular
So tasty!Registered User regular
I've been using a food diary to track what I eat over the past few weeks, and have noticed that I tend to be quite high in sugars due to the amount of fruit I eat.
My assumption is that these sugars are better for you than the sugars from a big bar of chocolate, but is this correct? How do they affect my body compared to a big bag of sweets?
My assumption is that these sugars are better for you than the sugars from a big bar of chocolate, but is this correct? How do they affect my body compared to a big bag of sweets?
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That said a little sugar isn't going to hurt you so long as you're not a hulking behemoth, in which case I'd avoid anything with sugar as much as possible, even fruits. Don't make it the highlight of your diet.
Also, the fruit has fiber in it, which counter-acts some of the other proposed negative impacts of high sugar intake (like still feeling hungry and wanting to eat more candy)
In Short: if you're going to eat sugar, the best way to get it is to get it from an actual fruit, and not in candy or juice drinks
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
There is a fair bit of sugar in fruit, but when you eat the fruit you're also gaining elctrolytes, vitamins, antioxidants, lots of fibre, even a little protein. So you need to physically eat a lot more bulk to get that amount of sugar than you would of candy, and you get a good payload of other good stuff with it. In short, both an apple and a pirce of candy might have about about the same amount of sugar, but you can easily eat a lot more sugar by eating candy than you can by eating the fruit.
If you like eating candy, then I'd suggest looking at good quality high-cocao (70%+) chocolate which not only has less sugar in it, but has a much stronger flavour so you don't need to eat nearly as much. I like to get the Lindt bars with hazlenuts or almonds in, which further reduce the sugar quotient (nuts are also quite nutritious) Plus chocolate itself (in moderate quantities) is actually quite good for you.
Everyone is going to tell you something different on this front, though. What I've found is that unless you are a diabetic or have some other problem with your metabolism, you can eat most things in moderation and still be a healthy person, especially if you're getting exercise.
I've also found that when I stay away from more heavily processed foods in general, I feel better. This holds true here: I eat lots of fruit, I feel good; I drink lots of 100% fruit juice... well.. I just go easy on the juice these days.
It's also not so much as finding a replacement for chocolate (although I am looking at the lindt bars now) but having an understanding of food and it's component parts makes it easier to find an intake that works for me.
????
Fructose and (rarely) glucose, found in fruit, are the most basic sugars, monosaccharides.
Sucrose, found in candy, is a disaccharide (composed of fructose and glucose).
In other words, exactly the opposite of what bowen said.
This is true, by the way. But the fact that it comes with other good things stands.
Man you need to stop talking chemistry in H/A. It is embarrassing to read.
Does it get turned in to some kind of energy straight away or stored for consumption later? My biology and chemistry are frighteningly weak so you'll probably need to explain this like I'm 5.
And I had meant that as "No it is not chemically bonded to form sucrose or sugar." Unless you had assumed I meant HFCS or something, which I suppose is chemically similar to sucrose.
Eating a peach is better than eating the equivalent amount of hard candy because you won't as much of a "sugar high" and you'll be satisfied longer.
That said, if your family has history of diabetes or heart disease you should control sugar intake, regardless of source (sucrose, HFCS, or fructose).
Edit: I accidently a word.
Well, that's why people who understand it go out of their way. Some people just go out of their way because it's the current bogeyman. :P
edit: Well Djeet and I just said very different things. Although I would argue that you feel satisfied longer with fruit because it's actually food that physically fills you, and a hard candy is a hard candy that dissolves to nothing.
I once found HFCS in some store brand dried fruit.
Sugar metabolism is rather complex. What are you trying to figure out?
To bring it back, though, that's where you have to look out for fructose. It's not a small amount of fruit that's the problem, it's the fact that the shit just sneaks into your diet in ways you would never be able to realize unless you're an avid label-reader like me (started when I started keeping kosher and that's when I really noticed), in amounts that are way above what your liver will healthfully process. It's not the fact that you have it at all, it's the excess.
Also note that this is less something you have to worry about if you live in Europe, from what I understand.
Sugar the bitter truth (youtube)
It's quite long (an hour and a half) but I think it's worth it.
This is a very good video, and there's a short (10-minute) version if that's a little more time than you want to spend thinking about it.
If you have any sort of insulin resistance or are obese, I would not drink fruit smoothies or eat a whole bunch of fruit in one sitting. The fructose must be processed by your liver and if you have issues with your liver (as mentioned above), it will really put a strain on it. (source: It Starts with Food, by Dallas & Melissa Hartwig).
sidenote: processed foods are made my companies, who want to make money. These foods are engineered to make you crave more of it, therefore, you buy more. You are an animal (when you break everything down) and your body is not meant to be able to process laboratory foods. This means, it is doing more harm to you than anything possibly good.
Origin: DustBunny777
3DS: 2836-0103-2102
Nothing in particular, just a greater understanding of biological processes, which I realise is a horrendously deep rabbit hole that you could fall down for years. If anything I'll probably keep having my apple and banana every day, just wanted to make sure I wasn't taking in a large amount of sugar that would be counter active to the healthy eating I've been doing for the past few months.
Also I am in the UK so I think HFCS is much more difficult to encounter over here. No family health issues either, so I think the take away is that it's fine to keep the fruits on as a snack but maybe switch em out for some nuts a few times a week.
The hardcore low-carb guys always pop into a thread like this and go on a rant saying you should give up all sugar, even from fruit, but I don't have much sympathy for this when applied to someone who is not actually on a low-carb diet.
When the newspapers tell us we should be eating less sugar, they are talking about Coca Cola and chocolate, even orange juice - not whole oranges. The amount of sugar in a coke dwarfs anything you could intake from eating oranges. With an orange, you need to peel and segment and take out the little pips. It takes time. You need to go wash off the sticky juice. You don't eat more than a couple. But you can just slug down a large coke in an instant and barely notice it. You can be sure that people with health problems from too much sugar got it from processed sugars, not natural fruits, even if the fructose in them are chemically identical.
I've been reading/listening to podcasts, etc all about how foods affect not just weight, but our moods and hormones. Really interesting stuff. When I've tried all of these suggestions out, it has made a huge difference in my energy levels on a daily basis.
Recommended readings:
It Starts with Food - Dallas & Melissa Hartwig (whole9life.com)
Practical Paleo - Diane Sanfillipo (www.balancedbites.com)
The Paleo Solution- Robb Wolf (robbwolf.com)
I hope this all helps!
Origin: DustBunny777
3DS: 2836-0103-2102
The op specifically asked about the science so I'll ask about HFCS even though it isn't necessarily relevant to those outside the US who don't have a giant corn subsidy. I thought the whole HFCS is worse for you than other sugars was a myth. Mostly because while there is a difference between how you digest fructose and glucose, high-fructose corn syrup is actually a misnomer. There's about the same amount of fructose in HFCS as there is in sucrose. Sucrose has 50% fructose and 50% glucose once you break it apart; which happens pretty readily. While HFCS has 42-55% fructose and 40-45% glucose; giving about the same amounts of fructose and glucose. Wikipedia seems to agree about HFCS not being worse than sucrose, but I'm curious if I am missing something.
Here's a paper showing that acute HFCS consumption led to higher blood pressure than sucrose sweetened drinks: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22152650
So there are differences. I think the bigger problem is the massive overuse of the stuff in the US. As was pointed out above, even some sliced deli meats contain HFCS. The fact that corn is extremely subsidized leads to HFCS being extremely cheap, and so it has been incorporated into a huge variety of products so if you don't pay attention you could be consuming it on pretty much all fronts. In moderation, I seriously doubt it has any distinguishing adverse effects compared to sucrose.
Yeah the 'HFCS is worse than sugar' debate is somewhat of a distraction, and the science is still pretty unsettled.. but it's (either due to misunderstanding, or deliberate creation of a strawman argument, depending on your opinion) really a co-option of the "HFCS and sugar are both bad for you and are inappropriately used in a ton of processed foods" argument, which is really the issue. There's a ton of foods that really have no need for sugar in them, but because HFCS is so cheap and it makes things taste sweeter (which makes them sell better), you now have higher levels of sugar/HFCS in things like breads, meats, etc that really don't need them at all. Something like Coke doesn't magically get orders of magnitude healthier when you buy the version that's made with sugar.
Unless you're sick or dehydrated, you don't need to go out of your way to add extra electrolytes to your diet. Antioxidants aren't useful at all to get from your diet: they're often though of as healthy because many very healthy foods (which are healthy for other reasons) contain them. However, just because a food has antioxidants does not make it healthy, such as:
It's not better for you than eating the same amount of calories from say, grapes. I'm not saying you shouldn't ever eat chocolate, just don't bother pretending it's good for you.
Juices are tricky. Some, even when they say they aren't made from concentrate, or are "100%" juice, aren't the same ratio of water to sugar as the liquid actually coming out of the orange. Many juice makers take the orange juice and remove water from it, effectivly increasing the sugar per ounce.
If you are buying smoothies, it's very likely that whoever makes them is adding sugar (or honey). While delicious, this is where the extra sugar is coming from. Also many use a yogurt base, which can be quite sweet depending on the yogurt. If you have a blender you can make your own and control how much extra sugar goes in.
And yes, unless you are grossly overweight or on a very calorie restricted diet, fruit is a fairly healthy choice, as long as it's just part of your overall diet.
But wikipedia also notes that the fructose and glucose are found in HFCS as monosaccharides, where sucrose is a dissaccharide. A seemingly stupidly small difference like the presence or absence of a chemical bond between the two molecules can make the world of difference to how your body treats the components, and it means that no matter what you want to think about them, sucrose and HFCS are NOT the same thing.
For example, one of the first things your body does in glucose-metabolism (the mechanism for energy-get) when it gets hold of a glucose molecule is tag it with a phosphate in a certain place. It then turns the glucose-phosphate into a fructose-phosphate via magic and crams another another phosphate onto the damn thing before tearing it up for parts. If you introduce a fructose into the process as a standalone molecule, you cannot expect your body to pick it up where that fructose-phosphate would have left off. It's not been tagged with the phosphate, the enzymes don't know what to do with it, and it gets sent somewhere else.
That's not all there is to it; it's a really complicated process and I oversimplify quite a bit, but it shows that your body really treats everything it gets differently depending on how it's organized, which can make the comparisons complicated. Something simple like having a disaccharide vs. two monosaccarides means that your metabolism has to do extra things to grab that glucose and make it something useful, and that's why the bonded form of fructose found in sucrose and other sugars and the free form may not be entirely comparable as far as what they do in your system.
That's not to say that anyone should go eating or drinking sucrose in excess either, but to say "eh, they both have glucose and fructose so they're essentially the same" can be very misleading. It's something I'd like to read more about someday, but chances are when that happens I'll be looking primarily at what the European scientists have to say on the matter.
Thro is also spot-on about the problem with juice.
Thanks dudes!