14 Nov 2013 Obesity experts appalled by EU move to approve health claim for fructose
Obesity experts say they are appalled by an EU decision to allow a “health claim” for fructose, the sweetener implicated in the disastrous upsurge in weight in the US and elsewhere.
Fructose, the sugar found in fruit, is used in Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other sweetened US drinks. Many believe the use of high-fructose corn syrup caused obesity to rise faster in the US than elsewhere in the world. Europe has largely used cane and beet sugar instead.
But the EU has now ruled that food and drink manufacturers can claim their sweetened products are healthier if they replace more than 30% of the glucose and sucrose they contain with fructose.
The decision was taken on the advice of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), on the grounds that fructose has a lower glycaemic index (GI) – it does not cause as high and rapid a blood sugar spike as sucrose or glucose.
But, say obesity experts, fructose is metabolised differently from other sugars – it goes straight to the liver and unprocessed excess is stored there as fat, building up deposits that can cause life-threatening disease.
There is potential for products high in sugar including soft drinks, cereal bars and low-fat yoghurts to make health claims by using fructose. Lucozade Original contains 33g of sugar in a 380ml bottle, Sprite has 21.8g of sugar in 330ml cans and Dr Pepper 34.1g per 330ml.
Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Elevenses bars have 18g of sugar in a 45g bar – so are more than a third sugar.
Barry Popkin – distinguished professor in the department of public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the US, who co-authored the groundbreaking paper linking high-fructose corn syrup to obesity in 2003 – said the ruling would lead to claims from food and drink firms that would mislead consumers…..
The Guardian: Read the full article
Fructose: the poison index
The battle over the compound fructose now reaches new levels of obfuscation. The food industry is a strong – and loud, and rich – proponent, hard to ignore. The European Food and Safety Agency has just weighed in, in favour of the substitution of sucrose (table sugar: a disaccharide composed of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose) with fructose alone, the sweeter of the two – even to the point of allowing health claims for fructose on the packaging of processed foods.
And yet the scientific data on fructose says it is one of the most egregious components of the western diet, directly contributing to heart disease and diabetes, and associated with cancer and dementia. Nature magazine has just published a scathing indictment of fructose by Dr Lewis Cantley, one of the US’s leading cancer researchers. But the EFSA says it sees no harm, justifying its stance on the basis that fructose has a lower glycaemic index than glucose.
The concept of glycaemic index is simple. This is how high your blood glucose rises after ingesting 50 grams of carbohydrate in any specific food, which is a measure of a food’s generation of an insulin response, and is used as a way of showing a food’s potential for weight gain. Glycaemic index is a proxy for how high your insulin level will rise, which determines whether that blood glucose will get shunted to fat cells for storage. Low-glycaemic-index diets promote blood sugar stability and are associated with weight loss. But the EFSA has missed the point. Glycaemic index is not the issue.
Glycaemic load is where it’s at. This takes into account how much of a given food one must eat to obtain 50 grams of carbohydrate. The perfect example is carrots. Carrots have a high glycaemic index – if you consume 50 grams of carbohydrate in carrots, your blood sugar will rise pretty high. But you would have to eat 1.3lbs – 600 grams – of carrots to get 50 grams of carbohydrate. Highly unlikely. Any high-glycaemic-index food can become a low-glycaemic-load food if it’s eaten with its inherent fibre. That means “real food”. But fructose is made in a lab. It’s anything but “real”.
Yes, fructose has a low glycaemic index of 19, because it doesn’t increase blood glucose. It’s fructose, for goodness sake. It increases blood fructose, which is way worse. Fructose causes seven times as much cell damage as does glucose, because it binds to cellular proteins seven times faster; and it releases 100 times the number of oxygen radicals (such as hydrogen peroxide, which kills everything in sight). Indeed, a 20oz soda results in a serum fructose concentration of six micromolar, enough to do major arterial and pancreatic damage. Glycaemic index is a canard; and fructose makes it so. Because fructose’s poisonous effects have nothing to do with glycaemic index; they are beyond glycaemic index…..
The Guardian: Read the full article
Additional reading:
Is sugar really toxic? Sifting through the evidence
Fructose: Toxic sugar or tortured logic?