Fructose is a natural sugar found in honey and fruit. It's a chemical that the body uses for energy and tolerates very well in small amounts. But if ingested in large quantities, the body suffers. The granulated fructose available in stores in not a natural sugar; it is a refined sugar as is the high fructose corn syrup found in most processed foods and drinks today.
In a published study by researchers at the University of Florida, it was found that when we ingest more than 90 grams per day, the body tends toward diabetes and kidney disease. Today we use four times as much fructose as we did in the early 1900s and the use of high fructose corn syrup as a cheap sweetener has accelerated the intake. The average consumption in the US is 60 pounds per year or 74 grams per day. This suggests that almost half of the population may be eating too much fructose.
The report states, “experimental studies in animals have shown that fructose can induce most features of the metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, abdominal obesity, elevated blood pressure, inflammation, oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction [cardiovascular disease], microvascular disease, hyperuricemia, glomerular hypertension and renal injury, and fatty liver.” These results were not found when animals were fed sucrose or starch of equivalent calories, suggesting that the results were dependent on the metabolism of fructose and not simply on excess calories.
We usually think of sugars as providing energy but fructose results in intracellular ATP depletion. ATP is part of the chemistry that cells need to produce usable energy in the body. This suggests a somewhat addictive quality since the body would initially feel energetic but quickly become fatigued from the ATP depletion. Fructose also causes the body to produce excess uric acid, a toxic waste product associated with gout, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
In other studies by the US Department of Agriculture, rats on a copper-deficient diet were fed glucose or fructose since sucrose breaks down to about fifty percent of each sugar during digestion. Only the rats fed fructose suffered gross abnormalities of vital organs and early death. Children and especially poor children are more likely to ingest excess fructose in processed foods and sweet soda drinks. As one chiropractor recently observed, “The bodies of the children I see today are mush.”
