The answer is
a definite yes as
according to Jack Challem, so when you shop for supermarket for a natural
juice to fill your body with vitamin and vitality, watch out for
Fructose, Sucrose , HFSC on the label of canned juice. You would be
surprised that many of them contain one or combination of the so called
natural sweeteners. The
best way is to make your own juice (vegetable + fruits ) with a powerful
juice mixer such as the "Omega 8002 Nutrition Center"
sold in Amazon.
The kids are being deceived by Dr Mecola - You tube video
If you consider fructose a safe, natural sugar, think again. You've
been had by one of the biggest nutritional bait-and-switch ploys in years.
Fructose and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) have been aggressively
promoted as natural sugars. After all, we've been taught since childhood
that fructose is fruit sugar.
The truth is that fructose and HFCS, as large-scale commercial
sweeteners, didn't exist 20 years ago. Now, they're almost as common as
sucrose-plain old white sugar. HFCS is routinely added to processed foods
and beverages including Coca-Cola, Snapple, and many health food products.
"Fructose is not from fruit. It's a commercial, refined sugar,"
asserted Robin Rogosin, a buyer and research coordinator at Mrs. Gooch's
Natural Foods Market in Beverly Hills, Calif.
In fact, a trail of medical studies dating back a quarter of a century
doesn't paint a terribly sweet picture for fructose. High fructose
consumption has been fingered as a causative factor in heart disease. It
raises blood levels of cholesterol and another type of fat, triglyceride.
It makes blood cells more prone to clotting, and it may also accelerate
the aging process.
"People should avoid it," urged John Yudkin, M.D., Ph.D., professor
emeritus at Queen Elizabeth College, London, and an expert in the health
effects of sugar.
Most fructose sneaks into the diet in the forms of sucrose and HFCS.
Sucrose breaks down during digestion into equal parts of glucose and
fructose. HFCS consists of 55 percent fructose blended with 45 percent
glucose.
As is the case with any other refined food, a little fructose won't
hurt you. The problem comes with the sheer quantity of "hidden" fructose
being consumed through the HFCS and sucrose in processed foods. For
example, conventional and "new age" soft drinks almost universally contain
11 percent HFCS by weight-2.2 pounds per case.
"The consumption of fructose has not increased over the last 40 years.
We have the data to show that we're not increasing fructose consumption,"
contended Mark Hannover, Ph.D., a researcher at the A. E. Staley
Manufacturing Co. of Decatur, Ill, the second largest maker of HFCS in the
United States.
Hannover is right about the past 40 years. But he sidestepped the
larger historical context. Overall sugar (sucrose) consumption remained
very low - a few pounds a year - until the industrial revolution. Advances
in processing made it easy to manufacture from sugar cane and sugar beets,
and people began eating more of it.
Although pure fructose has been available in small quantities for
decades, its use as common sweetener dates only from the early 1970s.
That's when the Finnish Sugar Co. developed a method to efficiently
synthesize it from cane and beet sugar. Now, Staley and five other
American companies make fructose from corn.
Staley's principal product is HFCS, which has captured a huge chunk of
the market once owned by makers of sucrose. The advantage of HFCS, from
the standpoint of food manufacturing, is that it's much sweeter than
sucrose, it's easier to handle during processing, it has a longer shelf
life - and it's cheaper than sucrose.
"We have improved the quality of sweeteners since the advent of HFCS,"
insisted Hannover. "It's clean microbiologically, it contains few sodium
ions, and it's more stable than sugar."
HFCS may be better than sucrose for manufacturing, but it's not any
better for health.
Because refined sweeteners - and refined foods, in general - lack bulk,
it's easy to consume large quantities of them. Staley grinds up a
mind-boggling 500,000 bushels of corn a day and turns them into more than
3 billion pounds of HFCS annually. Amazingly, that's only 20 percent of
the 16 billion pounds of HFCS consumed each year in the United States.
These days, our per capita intake of refined sugar is almost 150 pounds
a year. HFCS accounts for 51.7 pounds of that, and sucrose for 64.5
pounds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That translates
to about 60 pounds of fructose per person.
There's good reason to believe that, from an evolutionary standpoint,
our bodies can't handle such large quantities of sugar, particularly
fructose. Eating it poses a health hazard, and it doesn't matter whether
it's from HFCS or sucrose. But HFCS may be more dangerous because it
sounds more natural - and therefore healthier - than plain old white
sugar.
"We felt the healthiest approach was to stay away from refined sugars.
That way, we're not offering a lot of empty calories," said Bill Knudsen,
whose Chico, Calif., company has steered clear of fructose sweeteners for
its health food juices. "A pure fruit juice product is healthier for you
than a refined sugar because of the micronutrients that come with the
juice."
In medicine, the first alarms about the link between sugar consumption
and heart disease were sounded by Yudkin in the late 1960s. At the time,
he was chairman of the department of nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College,
London. Disturbed by inconsistencies in the evidence linking animal fats
to heart disease, Yudkin began searching for another dietary factor.
An expert in carbohydrate metabolism, he initially focused on sucrose
consumption. In laboratory and human tests, he found that sucrose
increased blood levels of cholesterol, triglyceride, uric acid, insulin,
and cortisol - all associated with an increased risk of heart disease.
Sucrose also raised blood pressure and increased the fragility of blood
platelet cells, making them more prone to clotting.
As dramatic as those findings were, the real surprise came when Yudkin
substituted fructose for sucrose in his experiments. "The effects of
eating sucrose in the quantities we eat are magnified with fructose.
Fructose is the dangerous part," he said. In contrast, glucose did little
more than cause cavities.
Although he has been retired for almost 20 years, Yudkin regularly
publishes articles and letters about sugar and heart disease in the
leading medical journals. In a phone interview, he was surprised to hear
that fructose and HFCS had become common sweeteners in the United States.
He said they were virtually unheard of in England, where overall sugar
consumption has been declining.
Other researchers have confirmed Yudkin's findings, but sucrose and
fructose are still recognized as generally safe by the Food and Drug
Administration. Many widely used products, like sucrose, were
grandfathered in as a safe product when food and drug regulations were
created early in 1938, and the safety of fructose was assumed based on the
perceived safety of sucrose.
"Fructose is part of the sucrose sugar. Sucrose is affirmed as GRAS
(generally regarded as safe)," explained Judy Folke, a spokesperson at the
FDA's Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Press Office in Washington,D.C.
"Fructose is not GRAS, but it was treated under prior sanction because it
had been used for so many years."
But the research suggests that, in retrospect, the FDA may have assumed
too much.
For example, fructose has been touted for years as a safe sugar for
diabetics because it doesn't trigger a rapid rise in blood sugar. That's
true, but the cardiovascular consequences may outweigh the benefits for
diabetics,who already face a higher than average risk of developing heart
disease.
In a recent study, John Bantle, M.D., of the University of Minnesota
sequentially placed 18 Type I (insulin-dependent) and Type II (noninsulin-dependent)
diabetics on two diets. The only difference between the diets was that one
contained carbohydrate as starch, which is digested as glucose, and the
other contained carbohydrate as fructose.
When they consumed the fructose, the diabetics had fewer spikes in
bloodsugar levels. Three of the Type I diabetics were able to reduce their
insulin intake, a positive change. However, according to Bantle's report
in the Nov. 1992 Diabetes Care, the diabetics' total cholesterol rose an
average 7 percent, and their "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL)
cholesterol rose almost 11 percent. The fructose increased their risk of
heart disease.
But fructose doesn't play havoc with only the hearts of diabetics.
Bantle noted the same effects in a study of 14 healthy volunteers who
sequentially ate a high-fructose diet and one almost devoid of the sugar.
While on the fructose diet, the subjects' total cholesterol levels
increased by 9 percent and the LDL fraction increased by 11 percent.
"There is some data that if you consume a lot of fructose, you can get
an increase in lipoproteins," Hannover told Natural Health. "A lot of this
is mediated by consuming fructose with other carbohydrates. We recommend
using a blend of carbohydrates - fructose may be the primary carbohydrate
with glucose or more complex carbohydrates."
"I'm not trying to ignore the data," he added, "but I'm not trying to
blow it out of proportion either."
There's another wrinkle. Add fructose to the typical American high-fat
diet - as most people do - and the risk of heart disease increases even
more. Sheldon Reiser, Ph.D., of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Human
Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, Md., studied 21 men eating two
kinds of high-fat diets. The diets were the same except for the
carbohydrate. One used simple starch, the other 20 percent fructose.
The cholesterol and triglyceride levels of all the men increased while
they consumed the high-fructose/high-fat diet, but not while they ate a
high-starch/high-fat diet. Ten of the men began the study with high blood
levels of insulin - another risk factor for heart disease - and their
cholesterol and triglyceride levels rose a whopping 30 to 50 percent.
Should people with moderate to high cholesterol reduce their intake?
The answer seems apparent.
"They might benefit from that," Hannover conceded. "We presume you're
under a doctor's care, and if you're not, you should be. If I had high
cholesterol, it would be on the list of foods to avoid - not on the top of
the list, but I wouldn't leave it off either, since there is some data to
support this view."
Fructose and other sugars contribute to heart disease in yet another
way. Dietary sugars increase what doctors call "spontaneous platelet
aggregation", an unnatural tendency toward blood clotting. But according
to a study published in the Aug. 1, 1990, Thrombosis Research, fructose
promotes abnormal clotting much more than does any other common sugar
does.
There's even more. Recent research by Forrest Nielsen, Ph.D., of the
USDA's Human Nutrition Research Center in Grand Forks, N.D., found that
fructose interferes with absorption of copper, an essential mineral needed
to create hemoglobin in red blood cells.
"Copper is affected by fructose," Nielsen told Natural Health. "With a
high intake of high-fructose corn syrup, people might show signs of a
copper deficiency and may need to enhance their copper intake."
In addition, when five volunteers ate a diet with 20 percent fructose,
their total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol shot up. But the combination
of suppressed copper and high fructose also increased the number of free
radicals, damaged molecules that contribute to cancer and aging.
Does Nielsen think fructose is safe? "I'm not going to damn fructose
because in small amounts it's not a bad substance," Nielsen said. But he
later acknowledged, "I'm not convinced it's completely safe."
There's one more significant side effect of fructose. It cross links -
that is, ties up - proteins in what biochemists call the Maillard
reaction. This cross linking occurs during the cooking of food, affecting
both the taste and the nutritional value of food.
But the Maillard reaction also occurs in the human body, and it's
suspected as a factor in diabetes and aging, according to William Dills,
Ph.D., a chemist at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dills
noted in the Nov. 1993 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that the
relationship between the "Maillard reaction-related cross-link in
proteins, cells,and tissues and the overall aging process appears
indisputable."
All this should not dampen your taste for fresh fruit or fruit juice.
The hazards associated with fructose appear to be dose dependent,
according to Yudkin and other experts. If you eat predominantly natural
foods, and avoid large quantities of processed foods, you have little to
worry about.
Fructose accounts for only 5 to 7.7 percent of the wet weight of
cherries,pears, bananas, grapes, and apples. That's about 5.5 to 8
teaspoons per pound of fresh fruit. There's even less fructose - 2 to 3
percent, or roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons per pound - in strawberries,
blackberries, blueberries, oranges, and grapefruit. Honey, refined by
bees, contains 40 percent fructose, but its extreme sweetness deters most
people from consuming it in large amounts.
Calls to health food stores around the country indicated a fairy high
awareness of fructose as a refined sugar.
Rogosin, at Mrs. Gooch's Natural Foods Market, pointed out that
carrying fructose-containing products would be contrary to the chain's
mission statement that emphasizes natural foods. "It has known health
effects - it increases cholesterol and triglyceride levels," she said.
Tim Connor, a buyer for Nature's Fresh Northwest! in Portland, Ore.,
pointed out that "there's no question that it's a highly refined sugar."
The health food grocery chain carries some products with fructose, though
not many.
"We have not taken a no-sugar stance," Connor said. "We have taken a
no-excessive-sugar stance. We carry a broader range of products than
what's found in more traditional health food or natural food stores."
Is there a safe amount of fructose? Yudkin reiterated that people
should avoid it and that they should be wary of sugars hidden in processed
foods. "Rather than switch to another sugar," he advised, "they should
gradually reduce the amount of sweetness in foods," he said.
And what's the view of the FDA, mandated by Congress to ensure food
safety? "We don't have any studies that show health effects (of
fructose)", said spokeswoman Folke, after checking with a scientific staff
member she declined to name. "We do not have any safety studies on it. If
a safety issue had come up, it would be big news."
This article originally appeared in Natural Health magazine. The
information provided by Jack Challem and The Nutrition Reporter™
newsletter is strictly educational and not intended as medical advice. For
diagnosis and treatment, consult your physician.
