What I don’t understand about these articles is the focus on HFCS: as I understand it, honey contains the same or more fructose per unit as HFCS, but these articles never seem to address whether we observe the same effects with it.
Replacing HFCS with honey is probably technically better for you, but chances are, if you’re an American, your consumption is probably way beyond that limit, and changing out HFCS for honey or sugar won’t make anywhere near enough of a difference to matter.
Avoiding HFCS is good practice for avoiding sugar, but ultimately you should just focus on limiting added sugar at this point and not worry so much about what kind it is. (Especially if you live in America, where the bread on a Subway footlong sandwich has a third of your daily sugar limit in it.)
ps. Fruit juice should be considered water with added sugar, for the purposes of avoiding sugar. Whole fruit is fine enough, since your body knows how to handle overeating fruit.
What about if you are, like most people are, also eating carbohydrates? How does the quantity of carbs being consumed affect this limit of sugar?
ed:
If you're asking "do I have to stop eating carbs", they're releasing these guidelines for normal people on a normal diet that includes carbs. If, instead, you eat an American diet, solve the sugar problem first and worry about the rest once you're past the withdrawal symptoms. You'll have to change your diet enough to avoid the sugar anyways and no point in making that extra-difficult.
The article is about the increased absorption of fructose, not glucose.
Honey is no different from HFCS or sucrose, from that same place: it, also, has no fiber.
A better question is if there's any reason not to. You should never blindly assume that biological research on one chemical translates to another. Seemingly small structural differences often (but don't always!) result in wildly different chemical properties. Additionally, biological pathways are incredibly (almost unimaginably) complex.
In this case, there's not a binary choice between fructose or glucose. You don't have to eat either as 100% of a diet, you can mix and match. Whether there's a reason not to eat pure glucose is not a better question health-wise, it's a much worse question than "should I intentionally eat either fructose or glucose as a large part of my energy intake?"
In particular, large excursions of blood sugar and insulin can cause down-regulation of insulin receptors resulting in insulin resistance, called type-2 diabetes. (BTW, some people can treat this with cinnamon. For others, enough cinnamon would cause even worse problems.)
You can recover from type-2 diabetes in reasonable time by cutting sugar and refined starch (e.g. white flour, white rice) from the diet. It is actually quite easy to do this if you cook for yourself, and surprisingly easy to learn to cook for yourself. It is most fun purely from-scratch, and no more work, and tastier. Start to think of fast-food as not really any sort of food at all.
Many people nowadays seem to find their way to cooking for themselves with an electric pressure cooker, because it is so fast.
EDIT: Apparently lots of someone else. I am content with my choice :)
But I feel like parent made a convincing argument that you as a consumer should consider fructose and other sugars as the same thing.
People in the US might have 50-100g of ‘sugar’ in their non-fat coffee, 50-100g of ‘sugar’ in their smoothie at lunch, and then a ‘sugar’ dessert at night. Whether that’s fructose, glucose, sucrose, honey, HFCS is not important relative to consuming 500% of the daily limit. No food marketing actually says that, so I thought I’d better do so.
The big difference in HFCS vs honey is the quantity that we are exposed to in processed foods. If they replaced all HFCS with honey, I can't imagine it would be very different.
HFCS: 55% fructose, 45% glucose
Sucrose: 50% fructose, 50% glucose
Honey: 50% fructose, 40% glucose, 10% maltose (dissacharide of two glucose molecules).
And your snark of "if you don't get it" is absolutely uncalled for here on HN. It's not appropriate.
What is not proven? That people gain weight when they consume more calories than they burn? That hunter/gatherers burn more calories than people sitting at a desk most of the day? That extra nutrient absorption might help active people?
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
“average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size”
The health threat from fructose is liver damage, and all the knock-on results of a sick liver, what they call Fatty Liver Disease, Metabolic Disorder, or lately Processed Food Disease. It differs little from the cirrhosis alcoholics get.
No, they truly cannot be, at least relative to the equivalent non-obese state. (I assume, of course, a sane definition for the term "obese").
I realize this has somehow (bizarrely) become a controversial issue in the US of late but the mountain of scientific evidence is incredibly clear on this point.
It is overwhelmingly worse to have metabolic disorder without obesity than to have obesity without metabolic disorder. Many, many non-obese Americans have metabolic disorder. A smaller number are obese without metabolic disorder.
As a matter of public health, attention is much better directed to metabolic syndrome and circulatory disease, which are more responsive to interventions. Obesity draws attention because it is easily visible, and because people have attached a moral stigma to it. Blinkered public policy has led to there being overwhelmingly more obese people than the natural rate; fix policy, and the rate would return to its normal level.
(2) https://www.angelesinstitute.edu/thenightingale/daily-sugar-...
By (1), 20% of a 2000 cal diet (assumption) would be 400 cal, or 100g sugar. By (2), average US sugar intake is 71.14g/day
..... of honey = ~1lb (and that seems high to me, personally)
A corn syrup free world would drive the price of nearly every fructose-laden food at least 5x higher, if not much more.