Fructose

And we know now that it's a lot of the additives in ultra-processed foods that is really damaging.

And then fructose that we find in lots of ultra-processed foods, particularly soft drinks, but also in lots of others.

I did a podcast with Professor Richard Johnson, and his research showed that unlike other nutrients, Fructose actually lowers the available energy inside cells and causes a mitochondrial energy crisis, particularly when you have a bucket load of fructose, as people do when they're drinking soft drinks and having lots of ultra processed foods.

So if you want to go deeper on that, just search my podcast with Professor Richard Johnson.

It's a cracker.

That is the start of fatty liver and metabolic diseases like diabetes.

Fructose also turns into uric acid, which leads to gout.

So there are many, many problems with processed foods.

And if you want the taste of sugar, but don't want the problems with sugar, then eat whole fruit.

So nowadays, we have a lot of sodium and very low amounts of potassium, very different from in the past.

Another interesting thing about Fructose is it causes sodium sensitivity.

What's the advantage of that survival-wise? Well, if you can make sodium more sensitive, you can absorb it more, it goes in your body, it can be retained more.

And another benefit of holding this sodium is to help you increase blood pressure because one of the really important things in the past was you don't want to end up with low blood pressure because you don't have enough sodium because we need to maintain the same amount of pressure to push the nutrients and the oxygen throughout our body including our brain next thing is abdominal obesity what would be the survival mechanism of that Well, we're storing fuel for another day.

The other simple sugar is fructose, and that's what's found in high fructose corn syrup, and also table sugar or sucrose.

That is one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose.

Fructose is a very important molecule for de novo lipogenesis because the fructose cannot be metabolized by any cell other than the liver.

Whereas most of the cells of your body, that is your heart, your muscles, your kidneys, your liver, can use glucose for energy, none of those can use the fructose.

So all the fructose that you eat essentially goes straight into the liver.

That's not true.

Fructose in modest amounts, like coming from just eating an apple, even if it's a modern big apple, that is a very modest amount of fructose and it's coming with fiber, which is going to significantly take the edge off how much and how rapidly it's coming into the blood.

But we've gone beyond that now where we're drinking six apples, whereas we would never just sit and eat six apples.

So the consumption of fructose, or even from high fructose corn syrup and sugar, of course, we're getting a lot of fructose.

Fructose is metabolized differently.

It is distinct from glucose.

There is human evidence to show you give humans two isocaloric drinks, same calories.

We definitely notice the impacts of all of these conditions, not only for lifespan, but for quality of life as you're living.

Fructose does not cross the blood-brain barrier.

So then this story needs to go beyond dietary fructose pretty quickly.

We should stay away from sugar.

But a lot of times people get too much sugar, but it's not just the type of sugar or the amount of sugar that's sometimes discussed.

It's the type as well.

Fructose is in fruits, but it's also added as a sugar to processed foods to sweeten those foods.

And today we're going to approach that subject and talk about fructose, the role it plays in the body, the emerging research by Chris Mearns and Dr. Paul Gross focusing on broader questions about its role as a sugar substance in energy balance and metabolic health.

No, no.

Fructose is seven times more glycating than glucose, and that's, that's fact number one that the people recommending the sugar diet don't know, but that's irrelevant.

Nobody cares about that.

We're just here to lose some weight, right? So another fact that they don't know is that fruit juices and fruits and high-fructose corn syrup, even though they have the syllable fru- or fruct in, in their name, also contain glucose and sucrose.

So when we were studying MASLD and also fructose, I thought HFI could be very interesting model to study because there is a block in fructose metabolism.

I was a little bit naive at that time, so these individuals should be protected from fatty liver because, well, fructose is a substrate for lipids.

Fructose can be converted into lipids.

So if, if that process is blocked, well, then you should be protected from fatty liver.

And this is-- was one of the collaboration projects I had with David.