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Comment by throwaway415415 | Hacker News Reader

I hear that a lot in the US (never elsewhere), but the only people in bad shape are those who abuse fat food and sodas. I’ve never seen anyone obese from drinking too much fruit juice alone.

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"I hear that a lot in the US (never elsewhere), but the only people in bad shape are those who abuse fat food and sodas. I’ve never seen anyone obese from drinking too much fruit juice alone."

You need to point your gaze downward. There are a great many children in the US who are given a sippy full of apple juice every waking minute of their lives - and they have the body mass to go with it. I'm sure they all graduate to soda or "sports drinks" by the time they're in your field of view.

I guarantee you that those kids eat fattening things besides juice daily too.

Around here, that’s mostly a cost issue. Hawaii for example has a real obesity problem relating to fruits and fruit juces.

However, insulin response is not just about total calories. Fruit juice is at the extreme edge becase of how rapidly you can consume and absorb sugar.

Do you have a study showing the average breakdown of the Hawaiian diet?

Fish, rice, spam, sugar and salt. With a few loco mocos thrown in for fibre.

> I’ve never seen anyone obese from drinking too much fruit juice alone.

You have whether you realized it or not. Fruit juice has just as much sugar as soda and none of the fiber from fruit that decreases your absorption. There are millions of people going to the gym and trying not to eat onion rings when the orange juice (or cranberry, or coconut water, etc.) they drink is what is actually keeping them fat.

It is not abuse, it is biochemistry. Your body is extremely efficient at absorbing carbs because in nature they only appear mostly encapsulated in fiber which gates their abortion. If you absorb a large amount of sugar your body has to immediately turn it to fat with insulin or you die. This results in a situation where you have met your caloric needs for the day but you will get very hungry again even though you met your needs. Most people can't deal with that and succumb to the natural desire to eat. The high sugar loading destroys your satiety mechanisms.

Your post is very well-written, but fructose does not affect insulin. Fructose is absorbed directly in the gut and converted to starch in the liver.

I don't want to stop the anti-carb echo chamber, though, because it's helped a lot of people.

High fructose consumption has its own set of health problems. There is still a lot of glucose in fruits. There is usually a large difference in glycemic index for whole/juiced fruits. Soda being mostly high fructose corn syrup still has a tremendous glycemic load.

This doesn't sound right.

The Wikipedia entry for fructose[1] has this to say:

Excessive consumption of fructose may contribute to insulin resistance, obesity, elevated LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, leading to metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

So it would appear fructose does cause an insulin response.

However, it then goes on to say:

Uptake of fructose by the liver is not regulated by insulin. However, insulin is capable of increasing the abundance and functional activity of GLUT5 in skeletal muscle cells. (emphasis mine)

GLUT5 is also expressed in skeletal muscle,testis, kidney, fat tissue (adipocytes), and brain.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLUT5

Insulin doesn't turn sugar into fat. It causes cells to uptake nutrients, including glucose, to be used as fuel. Only the liver converts sugar into fat, and the effect is pretty minimal, on the order of a few grams of fat per day (outside of a hyper-caloric diet).

Lipogenesis does not only occur in the liver. Lipogenesis occurs in adipose cells as well, and insulin stimulates this process.

I have a feeling that that is because refined sugar is absorbed in a different manner than the sugar in juice. Just speculation though.

You can "prove" this by looking at the glycemic index. Glycemic index is not a napkin math thing, its done by making people eat or drink something and watching what their blood sugar does.

A raw orange is 31-40.

Orange juice is 46-54.

Coca-cola is 63.

I think juice may be a _LITTLE_ better than soda. I still choose to drink neither, and think I am better off for it.

Right, fruit > juice > soda, and the gap between juice and soda is as high or higher than the gap between fruit and juice. To say juice is only a little better than fruit is to say fruit is only a little better than juice. If you have access to fresh fruit, great, but not everyone does and having juice might be better than no fruit products at all.

"I think juice may be a _LITTLE_ better than soda. I still choose to drink neither, and think I am better off for it."

You're making a very good choice. I would encourage you and others to consider the raw oranges 31-40 GI as, itself, very high and akin to something like dessert or a special treat.

Or, to expand on what a child of your post expressed:

soda < juice < fruit < ... < ... < vegetables/nuts

It depends on the fruit / vegetable. Some fruits like avocadoes and olives have very low GI and some vegetables like potatoes have very high GI.

It's stupid honestly, fruit juice are healthy in normal quantity. Like everything don't abuse it.

Just like alchohol, but that's not how people think of the juice they buy at the grocery store.

Maybe in the US. But I've never heard about abusing fruit juice before moving here.

I Just look at total g of sugar and total calories.

Most countries don’t have the sugar most Americans do in their daily diet. Look at the sugar in white bread.....

Do you mean people who abuse carbs? Fatty foods don’t really get you. It’s the carbs.

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