Fructose

Who doesn’t love fruit? It is Nature’s dessert, and comes loaded with all kinds of wonderful nutrients. The sugar in fruit is “fructose”, a simple sugar that gets metabolized differently than sucrose, or table sugar. While some fruit in your diet is not a bad thing, too much fructose can cause some metabolic havoc. Unless you are eating gobs of fruit every day, how would that happen? Well, in the 1970’s, the price of cane and beet sugar shot up. So food manufacturers turned to corn syrup to replace the expensive items. Not long after, manufacturers discovered that increasing the amount of fructose in corn syrup made it sweeter, and would sell more product. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was born and got added to everything from soft drinks to peanut butter to ketchup. Read your labels.

So what’s the deal with fructose? Sugar digestion occurs in the small intestine. A complex sugar like sucrose gets broken down into the simple sugars glucose and fructose. Glucose is the energy currency for your body. Your pancreas recognizes glucose and pumps out insulin so that the glucose can get into your cells and generate energy. It takes a little energy to break the bond in the complex sugar to make simple sugars, so that slows down absorption into the bloodstream. Every cell in the body can metabolize glucose, so the blood distributes it to where it needs to go.

When a simple sugar like fructose comes along, there is no bond to break, so fructose gets absorbed immediately. Moreover, your pancreas and cells don’t recognize fructose. The pancreas doesn’t make insulin in the presence of fructose and the cells can’t use it. The result is that the fructose goes through the portal vein, directly to the liver.

The liver is a busy place. Think of it like a manufacturing plant. Fructose is converted into glucose in the liver. If you need the glucose to go for a walk or solve a math problem, then it gets released into the bloodstream for energy. Great, everyone wins. But if there is excess sugar and we don’t need it all, it gets stored as glycogen. Glycogen is your reserves; it’s nice to have if we use up the easily available sugar in the bloodstream. But we have a finite storage capacity. If your glycogen levels are topped off, then glucose gets converted to triglycerides. If our liver is overworked or sluggish or there is a big surge in fructose and the liver can’t keep up, the conversion of glucose to triglycerides (TGs) gets backed up. In this case, people experience hyperglycemia (high blood sugar). The liver then packages TGs as very low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), which get out into the bloodstream. LDLs are the “bad cholesterol” that everyone talks about. So high cholesterol isn’t a fat problem; it’s a sugar problem.

Fructose is much more likely to become fat in the end. Very low-density lipoproteins and free fatty acids
(FFAs) have a high rate of conversion to fat. Fructose is more than likely going to become triglycerides and LDLs. When a triglyceride breaks down it becomes a free fatty acid. Free fatty acids accumulate in the liver causing fatty liver disease. They can also accumulate in the brain and pancreas and cause damage there. And the breakdown of free fatty acids produce uric acid, causing gout.

So does this mean that fruit is bad? Heck no! Enjoy that crisp fall apple! Let that be dessert. Natural fruit pectin and fiber slow sugar absorption, making a piece of fruit the perfect package. Manufactured “non-food” items with HFCS are the issue. Limit or eliminate those. If your liver needs a little assistance, think about a tea blend with dandelion, milk thistle seed, and burdock like “Spring Cleaning Detox Tea” to help a sluggish liver along.