Overweight? Always hungry?

[miriam_e]

Seems the food industry has been adding fructose to a lot of food and it has some unfortunate side effects. One, that I'll bet the industry knew about, is that it makes people hungrier. Other effects that, to give them the benefit of the doubt, they might not have known about, is that it stuffs up your insulin levels, badly affects your liver and causes you to become constantly tired and feel unwell.

Listen to the mp3:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/hrt_20070709.mp3
Read the transcipt:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/1969924.htm#transcript

Comments

[dances-withcats.livejournal.com]

Fructose is a naturally occurring sugar in fruit. It's high fructose corn syrup that's the baddie! And it is in EVERYTHING, at least, here in the USA. Even in allegedly "healthy" "fruit" juices. I use "fruit" in quotation marks because most "fruit" juices you get here are 10-20% real fruit juice and 80-90% water, artificial flavors and high-fructose corn syrup.

And people wonder why kids (and adults) are so fat around here? *sigh*

The thing is, if you want to get REAL fruit juice, you have to pay more for it. So cheap "fruit" juice is the feel-good, economical alternative for the McParent who doesn't want to deal with actually thinking about the food their kid eats.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Yep. That's more or less what the guy in the interview was saying. He said that fructose in fruit doesn't have the same deleterious effects because of the fibre, but juicing the fruit removes the fibre and causes big problems, so even "healthy" fruit juices are not good for you. But cheap fruit juices are even worse because, as you say, they have high-fructose corn syrup added.

I'll have to listen to the talk again because I've forgotten the details now, but adding fructose exploits some kind of loophole where they can say the food has a low glycaemic index (I think). And granted it doesn't get used the same way glucose or fat does, but it causes all these other problems of tampering with insulin levels, making people tired and hungry and causing them to lay down excess fat.

It isn't just fruit juices though. Apparently the industry is aware that fructose makes people hungry because they are adding it to many things other foods, like pretzels and hamburger buns. I'll bet it is in things like fried chicken these days too.