Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyounkins | Hacker News Reader

High fructose corn syrup is a very poor example. It is composed of fructose and glucose, both very familiar molecules to our bodies.

View on HN

However, glucose can be stored and metabolised throughout the body whilst fructose requires processing in the liver. Our bodies are not designed to have a large instantaneous "hit" of fructose. They can cope with slow release of natural fructose in fruits, but in processed food it's soluble and released very quickly. The kinetics of how it's processed are very different.

Apples are also much sweeter today than they were decades ago because of careful breeding. But this is perceived differently.

I tried removing sugar from my diet at one point. My sense of taste changed, some varieties of apples became too overpoweringly sweet to enjoy.

Sugar is 50% glucose / 50% fructose. GFCS is 40%/60% at worst, not a huge difference.

Humans didn't eat a lot of sugar until fairly recently, too. And even if you did, you'd have to be very, very rich to be eating it 3 meals a day.

Now you can get sugary cereal for breakfast, sandwich bread with HFCS for your lunchtime sammo, and a curry jam packed with palm oil and sugar for dinner. And that doesn't count the cookies or Pepsi you slam in between.

Raw sugar of HFCS -- don't matter none, it's that you're slamming em at each meal, all the time.

All I am saying is HFCS and sugar are pretty much the same thing and it makes no sense to vilify one and not the other.

They’re familiar, but not in the acute and frequent doses we receive it in these days.

Fructose is an appetite stimulant, so eating a lot of it will change your eating habits. And we definitely eat more fructose than a few generations ago.

In the same way that we have cannabinoid and opioid receptors, and the molecules that activate them are very familiar to our bodies, yeah.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com