More on sugar – sucrose versus fructose
read time: about three minutes
Sucrose (table sugar) is made from cane or beet sugar. Fructose is made from corn. Well fructose is found naturally in fruits, but the fructose used in food products is generally from corn.
Corn is a lot cheaper than cane. Additionally, fructose is about twice as “sweet” as sucrose, absorbs only 40% as quickly and causes a lower increase in blood sugar.
Cheaper and more efficient. Sounds good so far.
Since fructose absorbs more slowly and causes less rise in blood sugar, Doctors reasoned that it would be good for diabetics.
The food industry was delighted to come out with a plethora of fructose products (after all, it’s a lower cost ingredient).
Do you see where this is going?
Yep, sometime AFTER we fell madly in love with fructose, “we” decided to look a little more closely at it. And low and behold, there are some warts under that mask…
- Fructose has no enzymes, vitamins, and minerals… so it takes micronutrients from your body to assimilate itself.
- Fructose is not converted to useable glucose, but instead is removed by the liver.
- Fructose converts to fat more than other sugars leading to greater weight gain.
- Fructose raises serum triglycerides.
- Fructose increases total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol.
- Fructose reduces insulin sensitivity.
- Fructose interferes with the metabolism of minerals and chelates minerals out of the body including iron, calcium, magnesium, zinc and copper.
- Fructose browns food more easily which decreases protein quality.
- Fructose increase lactic acid in the blood.
- Fructose can cause bloating, gas and diarrhea.
In 1980 sugar consumption per year for the average person was 84 lbs. of sucrose and 39 lbs. of fructose.
1994 it was 66 lbs. of sucrose and 83 lbs. of fructose. That’s a 113% increase in fructose.
Try this…
next time you go to the grocery store, randomly pick out any five food products and flip them over. Do the ingredients include “corn syrup”, “high fructose corn syrup”… how close to the top are those ingredients?
check this out:
Looking at that bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes from a different perspective.
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Tags: Food labels, Nutrition, sugar
November 19th, 2007 at 6:08 am
i would like to ask, does this mean fructose does not cause diabetes?
Is it safe for a diabetic patient to take fructose (honey)?
If yes, what is the difference between sucrose and fructose? Why sucrose causes diabetes but fructose not?
Is it due to the ketoses and aldehoses?
I’m here to appologize that i ask that much of question instead of giving comment. I’m just curious about it, and generally this article is well writen.
January 7th, 2008 at 10:03 am
The fructose you are mentioning is from corn. What is the granulated fructose you buy in bulk made from ?
February 13th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Dan, I bought some granulated fructose and I see on the package it’s made from corn. I don’t know if that’s the same as the high frutcose corn syrup this article tells about. But I think for now what I’ll use is a very small amount of sugar. I was using artificial sweeteners and have sworn off them! The tiny sugar in tea won’t make it nearly as sweet but I hope to get used to it. I’m trying to control diabetes II (no medication) and clear up a sinus problem.
I’ll write again if I find an answer and hope you will, too.
Donna
February 13th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
hi Donna,
Congratulations on trying to control your diabetes.
Both use corn fructose. High Fructose corn syrup is MUCH sweeter.
You can try stevia which is an herb.
You can also try sweet teas such as Rooibos – which is not
caffeinated. If you want caffeine, you could blend in some
Rooibos with the preferred caffeinated tea.
Another tea which is nice is Jasmine Green tea… caffeinated,
aromatic and a touch sweet.
-Patti
March 18th, 2008 at 5:58 am
There are so many types of sugars listed, how do we know what are the right ones to eliminate?
Examples are carob syrup, dextran, diastase, maltodextrin, date sugar, etc. Many foods contain maltodextrin, is this a good sugar? It is very confusing as which foods to keep and which to get rid of.
June 12th, 2008 at 4:26 am
[...] Fructose is healthier than Sucrose. – Sucrose (table sugar) is made from sugarcane. Fructose is usually made from corn (also found in fruits) and is a cheaper alternative to Sucrose. Once thought to be healthier, fructose actually has many negative downsides. Some of these downsides include cholesterol increases and digestion difficulty, in addition to the fact that it converts to fat more easily than other types of sugar. [...]
June 25th, 2008 at 10:43 am
[...] Fructose is healthier than Sucrose. – Sucrose (table sugar) is made from sugarcane. Fructose is usually made from corn (also found in fruits) and is a cheaper alternative to Sucrose. Once thought to be healthier, fructose actually has many negative downsides. Some of these downsides include cholesterol increases and digestion difficulty, in addition to the fact that it converts to fat more easily than other types of sugar. [...]
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:59 pm
To manufacture High Fructose Corn Syrup you have use a genetically modified enzyme. HFCS should be labeled as an artificial sweetener but because the unnatural process produces a product that contains sugars found in nature they don’t have to label it that way. It seems to me if you have to use something that is not found in nature to make something then the product shouldn’t be considered natural. In fact, Sprite or 7up had “All Natural” on their cans for a short period and had to go to court to change it to “All Natural flavorings” because of the HFCS. Look it up.
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Ahh Jack,
It’s blatantly apparent you don’t work in government.
I’m familiar with Sprite & 7Up being “All Natural”.
There are specific qualifications to use “organic” on the label (tho there’s some sketchiness there). But the FDA has extremely broad regulation concerning “natural”.
There’s more teeth in the “truth in advertising” regulation that rests on what a typical person would believe about a claim. Hence, they decided to add “flavorings”.
By the way, have you seen the latest 7Up commercials. They’re equating 7Up with carrots out of the ground.
Right up there with “whole” wheat Trix.
July 30th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] The real Prince of Darkness seems to actually be something we often use instead of our sweet caney goodness: Fructose. Fructose can be found in natural foods like fruit, but oftener it’s chemically combined with glucose to artificially sweeten our foods. As a whole the processing is a cheaper solution than using sugar. Unfortunately, in addition to saving some money, fructose has a few other special features. [...]
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:39 pm
can too much high frutcose corn syrup in sodas or teas cause diabetes?
September 7th, 2008 at 12:28 am
[...] Fructose is healthier than Sucrose. – Sucrose (table sugar) is made from sugarcane. Fructose is usually made from corn (also found in fruits) and is a cheaper alternative to Sucrose. Once thought to be healthier, fructose actually has many negative downsides. Some of these downsides include cholesterol increases and digestion difficulty, in addition to the fact that it converts to fat more easily than other types of sugar. [...]
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:46 am
I recently read elsewhere what is being posted here about granulated fructose not being all it has been cracked up to be–My wife and I have been using it for a couple of years on the Formula 40-30-30 plan. We have had sucess but are alarmed. What, if any, is a good alternative?
November 12th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I’m trying to figure out the bottom line here … is all natural, powdered fructose healthier than sucrose when trying to follow a low fat, low cholesterol, heart healthy diet?
Not only do I not like the taste of artificial sweetners such as Equal, they also cause stomach pain for me. I recently discovered Stevia, which I believe will be fine for teas, coffee, etc., but what about cooking and baking?
January 17th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
[...] are made sweeter by adding fructose. In other countries soft drinks are more often sweetened with sucrose or [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 5:32 am
There are many naturally occurring sugars. Sucrose (common “table sugar”) is a naturally occurring disaccharide. “Di” means two. “Saccharide” means sugar. Therefore, sucrose is a sugar made up of relatively equal parts of two other sugars. Those two sugars are Glucose and Fructose. During digestion, our bodies break sucrose down, into glucose and fructose.
Starting with corn, which contains mostly glucose, scientists can use chemical processes to convert the glucose into fructose. This creates High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS. (Ordinary “corn syrup,” on the other hand, contains mostly glucose). HFCS is cheaper than ordinary table sugar (sucrose), partly due to high tarriffs imposed by the US in 1977 on sugar (sucrose) imports. Therefore, HFCS has become the sugar of choice for many food manufacturers. To make HFCS, corn (which contains high amounts of glucose) is milled to produce corn starch, which is then treated with enzymes that convert the glucose into about 90% fructose. This fructose “syrup” (”HFCS 90″) is diluted with glucose, in different ratios, to create two other fructose syrups, including HFCS 55 (55% fructose, used for Soda drinks, among other things), and HFCS 42, primarily used for baked goods.
It is important to remember that Fructose is not a “bad” sugar. It occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables. HFCS, on the other hand, is a man-made sugar. It can be made to contain different ratios of fructose to glucose, and those proportions are not necessarily what our bodies are engineered to process. Excessive amounts of fructose in our diets has been linked to obesity, chronic diarrhea, and fatty liver disease, among others. We need to educate ourselves about the foods we eat, and ask if it’s necessary to have so many “manufactured” ingredients in our diets.
This information was largely pulled from Wikipedia.