So people for many many years thought fructose, "Yeah, that's pretty good stuff.
So, you know, what can be wrong with that?" The problem really with fructose is the
way it's metabolized. So whereas your whole body can use glucose, so when you
eat bread, for example, insulin goes up and all the cells of your body will use
that glucose. So your muscles, your liver, your kidneys, and everything. When you eat
fructose, none of it can use fructose, because it's not-
you can't metabolize it, so it goes straight into your liver. And your liver
has nothing to do with it, because there's plenty of glucose around,
so if you take sugar, table sugar it's one glucose, one fructose, you have plenty
of glucose around, so your body doesn't want it. It goes into your liver and therefore
gets turned sort of straight into fat. So it immediately becomes fatty liver. As
you develop, so more and more fatty liver, then that's when you get the insulin
resistance and the type 2 diabetes, that's really the core problem is this
fatty infiltration of the liver. So the story with fructose is that when we talk
about sugar there's sort of a technical term which is encompasses glucose and
fructose, those are the main sugars of the body. When we talk about table sugar,
it's actually something called sucrose, which is one molecule of glucose and
molecule of fructose. So if we ignore things like lactose and galactose and
stuff, it's mostly glucose and fructose that we're talking about. So if you eat
bread, wheat, or rice or something, you're talking mostly chains of glucose, which
is what makes up starch. So the the bread, and the rice and the potatoes, those are
all mostly glucose and almost no fructose. Fructose in table sugar is one to
one, so it's one glucose one fructose, and fruits mostly contain fructose. Fructose
is the sweetest naturally occurring carbohydrate, and when you look at a
measure such as the glycemic index, fructose looks pretty good,
because when you measure blood sugar it's actually blood glucose you're
measuring, so because fructose is not glucose, when you eat fructose it doesn't
show up as a spike in your blood glucose. When you eat bread, because it's all
glucose, it will show up as a spike in your blood glucose. So if you think about
it, if you were to take a pound of bread or pasta or whatever, all, say your body
weighs 180 pounds, all 180 pounds of your body
is using up glucose. If you take a pound of sugar, for example, then half of it is
glucose and half of it is fructose. So 180 pounds is going
to use the glucose but all sort of half a pound of sugar is going straight into
your liver, like the five-pound liver. So in other words, the fructose is many, many,
many times worse at causing type two diabetes, obesity,
you know, insulin resistance than the glucose. And that's really the secret of
why there were these societies, like China for example, in the 80s where
they're eating a lot of white rice, that's all they ate practically, white
rice and vegetables, and there is virtually no diabetes. The reason is that
their bodies their muscles and everything is using it. As opposed to the
the fructose, which is going straight to your liver, directly causing this
insulin resistance. So if you think about it, you have a hundred and eighty pounds
of body using glucose. For fructose, there's a five pound liver, so it's like
you know, ten or twenty times worse to eat the sugar than it is to
eat the bread. And that's something that people have always recognized. Again, if
you just simply were to ask your grandmother, she would have told you that
the first thing you want to do to lose weight is stop eating sugar, stop eating
the sweets. It's much more fattening. It might be the same calories, but the way
is metabolized is completely and utterly different. So sugar is really the main
thing, and I think if you look at sugar, it's really sort of tapered off. A lot of
people have been cutting it out. So there's hope that the message
that sugar is really a huge problem is getting out there. The problem is there's
a lot of hidden sources of sugar and so on.