It's hard to resist the sweet taste of sugar and the quick energy boost it provides. Your desire to stay slim may lead you to try every sugar substitute and artificial sweetener on the market. Substituting natural sweeteners, like high-fructose corn syrup or honey, for table sugar may bring unwanted results when you hop on the scales -- as can relying on manufactured weight loss products. You may be surprised to learn that many of those slimming beverages and snacks you've been buying are sweetened with fructose.
What is Fructose?
Fructose is the natural sugar in fruit. Fructose is scientifically categorized as a carbohydrate called a monosaccharide -- the simplest form of carbohydrate that cannot be broken down into simpler sugars. Honey and fruit juices contain fructose with another monosaccharide, glucose, and a disaccharide, sucrose -- a "double" sugar made from glucose and fructose. Manufacturers add fructose to soft drinks and processed foods as a "natural sweetener." Fructose may appear on food labels as corn syrup or corn sugar. You may also see it on ingredient lists as "nutritive sweetener" or "added sugars."
Table Sugar
Sucrose, or table sugar, is derived from fruits and vegetables -- primarily from sugar cane or sugar beets. The process for making white table sugar is the same, regardless of the source: Boil or soak the plant in hot water to separate the sugar into a syrupy molasses; cool, then whirl the molasses in a centrifuge to isolate the sugar crystals and dry them. People seem to love the flavor of sugar. However, the calories that sugar contains are less desirable.
Nutritive and Nonnutritive Sweeteners
Sweeteners are either nonnutritive or nutritive. Encyclopedia Britannica explains that nonnutritive sweeteners are synthetic compounds that provide few or no calories or nutrients to the diet, while nutritive sweeteners -- glucose, fructose, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and sugar alcohols -- provide energy, or calories, as carbohydrates.
Nonnutritive sweeteners such as saccharin and aspartame have generated controversy regarding their safety -- although scientific research tends to show otherwise. Nonetheless, health advocates and some naturalists promote fructose and other nutritive sweeteners as a safer alternative to refined sugar and processed artificial sweeteners.
Manufacturers of slimming foods and beverages may add nutritive sweeteners despite the added calories. High-fructose corn syrup is less costly than synthesized sweeteners. Look on the label of your favorite canned diet shake to see if fructose is an ingredient. Also, check packaged shake mixes, meal bars, "light" yogurt and sports drinks, as they often contain fructose or other nutritive sweeteners.
Fructose Contoversy
Research has shown that high-fructose corn syrup causes weight gain in laboratory rats. A 2008 study by Alexandra Shapiro and colleagues at the University of Florida showed that feeding rats a 60-percent fructose diet for six months induced leptin resistance. Subsequently, researchers switched the rats to a high-fat diet for two weeks and injected them with leptin -- a protein hormone that regulates metabolism. The rats showed no response to the hormone and experienced rapid weight gain.
In 2010, Princeton University researcher Bart Hoebel and associates compared the weight of laboratory rats that were fed caloric equivalents of high-fructose corn syrup and sugar. Results proved that the corn syrup-fed rats gain substantially more weight with abnormal increases in body fat.
Considerations
Fructose is nutritionally equivalent to regular sugar and contains about the same amount of calories. You won't lose weight by adding fructose to your diet. Nor is there an advantage to using fructose if you are diabetic -- it can raise blood sugar the same as table sugar.
Some individuals are fructose-intolerant. Mayo Clinic nutritionist, Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D., defines two conditions of fructose intolerance: 1) a hereditary condition in which a person lacks the enzyme to digest fructose, and 2) a condition in which malabsorption of fructose causes issues with digestion. If your fructose intolerance is genetic, liver and kidney damage can occur with continued ingestion of fructose or table sugar. Gas, bloating and diarrhea occur if your problem is one of malabsorption.
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