Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

There might be a dietary difference, even though it seems superficially like there shouldn't be. This is my summary of the reaction from a chemist who did her master's degree in sugar chemistry: "Complex sugars (sucrose) and starches are broken up into glucose and fructose quite efficiently by enzymes in your digestive tract. Only glucose and fructose are absorbed into the bloodstream."

That chemist is my mom. So I'm biased. ;-)

The puzzle is whether table sugar and high fructose corn syrup have different dietary effects, and if they do, why. I don't think it's a settled matter.

View on HN

There is clearly a difference in the uptake of fructose and glucose as you can see here, no insulin is required to uptake fructose. https://phdmuscle.com/fructose-metabolism/

If there is a difference in fructose and high fructose corn syrup it would likely be the fact that it is corn based. Corn has been selected to be farmed with high glycophosate (round up ready), which metabolically different from other corns and produces some proteins not found in non GM corn. https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-0...

No insulin is necessary? Please don't propogate nonsense.

Its true, check the link and look at the metabolic pathway. insulin is a response to glycogen from the fructose 6 phosphate formed during glucose metabolism. since fructose converts to fructose 1 phosphate form no glycogen is released and so no insulin is required to uptake fructose.

Anyway, apparently HFCS contains about 50% glucose so it would require insulin, but less than pure glucose.

Fructose doesn't need insulin to be converted to glucose in the liver, but I don't think this is what you are thinking at all. Fructose isn't used by the body directly, it almost always has to be first converted to glucose first. Glucose does require insulin to be pulled into cells throughout the body. So fructose does require insulin to be used by the body for energy or to be stored into fat.

When you say insulin isn't needed for fructose it's a fundamental misunderstanding on a few different things.

My layman understanding is that insulin is used to absorb blood glucose into muscle and fat cells, while fructose is processed by the liver into other things (which may include glucose), but that initial processing doesn't require insulin.

Glucose gets broken up in the liver but fructose doesn't. So those with slow liver processing like Gilbert's syndrome the differences between the two make a bigger difference.

High fructose corn syrup floods the system (body) and it can't process it quick enough.

Don’t you have that the wrong way around?

HFCS is high fructose compared to regular corn syrup. It's not necessarily high fructose compared to table sugar (sucrose). Table sugar is 50% fructose by weight; HFCS comes in 55% and 42% fructose varieties. The FDA says [1] the 42% variety, which has less fructose than table sugar, is used in most processed food other than soda. So fructose doesn't seem like a plausible mechanism for non-soda HFCS to be worse for you than table sugar.

I don't like HFCS--I think it gives sodas a flavor I can best describe as "sharp," based on blind taste tests I've done comparing same-brand sugar and HCFS sodas--but I don't see solid evidence that it's worse than sucrose. I think it's mostly used as a scapegoat by people who don't want to conclude that sugar in general is bad for you.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/high-fruct...

> The puzzle is whether table sugar and high fructose corn syrup have different dietary effects, and if they do, why. I don't think it's a settled matter.

I don't know how you would design a study around it, and this is an anecdote, but I find sugar sweetened soda to be much less palletable than HFCS sweetened soda.

That wouldn't necessarily show up in a study comparing equal intake, but could be a factor in reducing intake of sweetened beverages in places without HFCS compared to those places with.

I'll go one step further. A gram of sugar in an orange is not the same as a gram of sugar in a teaspoon.

Medium matters - that sugar in an orange is dissolved in the juice which is locked in the pulp.

Who knows what the bioavailability of the sugar is in that messy fibrous orange you partially chewed? I guarantee it'll be less than that pure refined sugar in the spoon.

Our "datafication" of nutrition and stuff like calories has led to so much silly pseudoscience.

Calories are my biggest pet peeve of BS to take with a grain of salt. Why are we basing our nutrition and diet on the performance of the food in a bomb calorimeter?

Table sugar is 1/2 glucose and half fructose. An orange is 100% fructose. The medium of the pulp allows for slower absorption and the fiber does a number of things like simulating the intestinal walls.

> An orange is 100% fructose

It is not:

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/746771/nutrients

In fact an orange is a mixture of glucose, fructose, and sucrose (which itself is glucose and fructose). An orange actually looks surprisingly like table sugar in terms of the sugar types, although you are correct that the pulp / fiber / etc do mean that the response of our body is likely different.

It is known that people who consume sugary drinks are at higher risk of death from disgestive diseases, which is less so for people who consume artificially-sweetened drinks. So there may be a causal link.

https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

There do appear to be some specific effects of sucrose, although there are no immediately obvious health implications:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223... (unclear disaccharide effect of sucrose)

https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.493983 (unclear, but seemingly harmful, disaccharide effect of sucrose)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223... (disaccharide effect of sucrose but not maltose)

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-011-0228-x (unclear, but seemingly beneficial, disaccharide effect of sucrose)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-developme... (unclear, but seemingly harmful, disaccharide effect of sucrose)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hipo.22368 (very surprising beneficial disaccharide effect of sucrose that should require further confirmation)

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... (John Ioannidis, Why Most Published Research Findings are False, cold shower to the preceding)

I think that at least it is not obvious that sucrose intake should be equivalent to invert sugar intake. In order for sucrose to be saccharified, the enzyme sucrase must be produced; in order for sucrase to be produced, some internal regulation must occur; if some internal regulation occurs, other effects are at least possible. But no such effect has been clearly demonstrated as far as I can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com