Read Online The Sugar Smart Diet: Stop Cravings and Lose Weight While Still Enjoying the Sweets You Love by Anne Alexander, Julia VanTine - Free Book Online
Authors: Anne Alexander, Julia VanTine
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inflammation becomes severe enough, scar tissue replaces healthy tissue, impairing the liver’s ability to perform its many crucial functions. When that happens, it’s called cirrhosis. (Cirrhosis only happens with really severe alcoholism, right? At least that’s what I always thought. Now, it appears, an excessively sugary diet could play a role, too. Amazing.) A fat-riddled liver may become resistant to the action of insulin. As the pancreas churns out more and more of this fat-storage hormone to prod the liver into doing its job, insulin levels increase—and so does body fat.
FRUCTOSE: THE QUICKER FATTER-UPPER
As you’ll recall, one of the liver’s jobs is to convert the sugars in food into fuel for the body. It’s also tasked with turning excess energy into body fat. This process is called lipogenesis, and at least theoretically, research suggests, the body may turn fructose into body fat more efficiently compared to sucrose and glucose.
An early study that looked for a link between fructose consumption and body fat was conducted on mice. German researchers allowed them to freely drink either plain water or fructose-sweetened water—the rodent version of soft drinks—for 10 weeks. Though the fructose-sipping mice regularly ate fewer calories from solid food, they gained weight and ended up with 27 percent more body fat than the mice that drank plain water. Because fructose doesn’t need insulin to enter the cells, it floods the body and is quickly stored as fat, the study found.
Another study, this one on people, addressed the question of whether fructose really does cause the body to pack on fat. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center fed “breakfast” to six volunteers—four men and two women. That morning meal was actually 8 ounces of lemonade that contained three different combinations of sugar—100 percent glucose, an equal mix of glucose and fructose, and 25 percent glucose and 75 percent fructose.
Immediately after the volunteers had breakfast, the team measured the conversion of the sugars to fat in the liver. Four hours later, the volunteers ate lunch—turkey sandwiches, salty snacks, and cookies. Each volunteer’s lunch contained different amounts of sugars based on body weight. Then the researchers measured how the food was metabolized.
The results: Lipogenesis rose 17 percent when the volunteers had the fructose-containing drinks, compared to 8 percent for the glucose drink. Simply put, their bodies made fat more efficiently. Further, after metabolizing fructose in the morning, the liver increased the storage of fats eaten at lunch. As the study’s lead researcher, Elizabeth Parks, PhD, put it: “The carbohydrates came into the body as sugars, the liver took the molecules apart like Tinkertoys, and put them back together to build fats. All this happened within 4 hours after the fructose drink. As a result, when the next meal was eaten, the lunch fat was more likely to be stored than burned.” Although this research is preliminary, it certainly raises important questions about starting your day with a fructose-filled sugary drink.
Most likely, these results underestimated the effect of fructose because the test subjects consumed the sugar drinks while fasting and because they were healthy and lean, and could presumably process the fructose quickly, according to Dr. Parks. So the fat-packing potential of fructose may be worse if you’re overweight, because this process may be already revved up.
MAKING THE METABOLIC CONNECTION
As you may know, carrying extra pounds sets the stage for a host of metabolic diseases. You’re familiar with the BOGO sales at stores? With metabolicsyndrome, you “buy” the extra pounds, and you’re likely to get all the nasty freebies—belly fat, high blood pressure, high fasting blood sugar, low HDL (“good”) cholesterol, and high triglycerides (fatty substances in the blood).
You don’t have to be overweight to have
FRUCTOSE: THE QUICKER FATTER-UPPER
As you’ll recall, one of the liver’s jobs is to convert the sugars in food into fuel for the body. It’s also tasked with turning excess energy into body fat. This process is called lipogenesis, and at least theoretically, research suggests, the body may turn fructose into body fat more efficiently compared to sucrose and glucose.
An early study that looked for a link between fructose consumption and body fat was conducted on mice. German researchers allowed them to freely drink either plain water or fructose-sweetened water—the rodent version of soft drinks—for 10 weeks. Though the fructose-sipping mice regularly ate fewer calories from solid food, they gained weight and ended up with 27 percent more body fat than the mice that drank plain water. Because fructose doesn’t need insulin to enter the cells, it floods the body and is quickly stored as fat, the study found.
Another study, this one on people, addressed the question of whether fructose really does cause the body to pack on fat. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center fed “breakfast” to six volunteers—four men and two women. That morning meal was actually 8 ounces of lemonade that contained three different combinations of sugar—100 percent glucose, an equal mix of glucose and fructose, and 25 percent glucose and 75 percent fructose.
Immediately after the volunteers had breakfast, the team measured the conversion of the sugars to fat in the liver. Four hours later, the volunteers ate lunch—turkey sandwiches, salty snacks, and cookies. Each volunteer’s lunch contained different amounts of sugars based on body weight. Then the researchers measured how the food was metabolized.
The results: Lipogenesis rose 17 percent when the volunteers had the fructose-containing drinks, compared to 8 percent for the glucose drink. Simply put, their bodies made fat more efficiently. Further, after metabolizing fructose in the morning, the liver increased the storage of fats eaten at lunch. As the study’s lead researcher, Elizabeth Parks, PhD, put it: “The carbohydrates came into the body as sugars, the liver took the molecules apart like Tinkertoys, and put them back together to build fats. All this happened within 4 hours after the fructose drink. As a result, when the next meal was eaten, the lunch fat was more likely to be stored than burned.” Although this research is preliminary, it certainly raises important questions about starting your day with a fructose-filled sugary drink.
Most likely, these results underestimated the effect of fructose because the test subjects consumed the sugar drinks while fasting and because they were healthy and lean, and could presumably process the fructose quickly, according to Dr. Parks. So the fat-packing potential of fructose may be worse if you’re overweight, because this process may be already revved up.
MAKING THE METABOLIC CONNECTION
As you may know, carrying extra pounds sets the stage for a host of metabolic diseases. You’re familiar with the BOGO sales at stores? With metabolicsyndrome, you “buy” the extra pounds, and you’re likely to get all the nasty freebies—belly fat, high blood pressure, high fasting blood sugar, low HDL (“good”) cholesterol, and high triglycerides (fatty substances in the blood).
You don’t have to be overweight to have
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