Tuesday, February 28, 2012

How Bad Is Fructose?

From the Edmonton Journal:

http://junkscience.com/2012/02/23/fructose-not-the-main-villain-in-obesity-epidemic-canadian-researchers-say/

Is it time for a personal health and fitness update? Regular readers remember that, although I became too top-heavy to be a "high fashion" model in grade six, I've worn the same shirt/dress size since grade nine. This hasn't changed. Only my jeans size changes from year to year.

Have I ever been fat? I've felt fat. Let's just say...I see a lot of diet products advertised with "before and after" pictures. "Before" is a Wide Load. "After" is a body that would not be described as emaciated, in tight-fitting clothes. When I look or feel like "After" I start looking for a physical-labor-type job.

I drink soda pop. I'm not saying that soda pop is a health food or that everybody should drink it. As a caffeine addict, I crave something, if only some form of sugar, along with my caffeine, and prefer soda pop to coffee-with-cream-and-sugar. Obviously any form of sugar contains calories...but I have to say that I've not noticed fructose affecting my metabolism in the ghastly way diet soda did.

There was a year in my early twenties when I tried to reduce my sugar intake by drinking diet soda. I felt less energetic than usual, but back then everybody on every job was older than I was and seemed to think this was a good thing. Then I tried to kick the caffeine habit. Whoa! Instant weight gain. Ugly weight gain. With loss of energy. I thought I might be becoming hypothyroid, like my mother, who had never used caffeine or drunk soda pop. I wasn't, though; I was just displaying what I've read is a common reaction to NutraSweet in diet soda. When I switched back to drinking moderate amounts of regular, sugared and caffeinated soda pop, the process of zombification reversed, the ugly fat melted away, and once again I felt energetic enough to be annoying to sluggish people.

Based on this experience, I'd warn people who may be hearing and seeing a lot about fructose causing weight gain: Do not switch to diet soda. If you can switch to drinking unsweetened tea or plain water, cutting out all soda pop may be an easy way to lose weight...but some forms of "diet sweeteners" actually depress metabolism and cause weight gain.

Two years ago, while spending a lot of time watching TV with a stroke survivor, I gained enough weight to feel motivated to lose some. I've spent the past two years slowly, steadily losing weight. Two full jeans sizes, and dropping. And I feel fine. And I eat whatever I want. Fructose in soda pop? Chocolate bars? Chips? Fried chicken? Ice cream? Greasy hamburgers? Banana bread? Those aren't the groceries I take home, but if they're what's available on the road or what someone's willing to treat me to at a fast-food "restaurant," no problem. They're not going to ruin the effects of my diet. There is no "diet."

I try to avoid thinking consciously about calories. And although I've skipped a few meals due to cash flow problems during the past year, I definitely don't recommend fasting for weight control--actually fasting (or crash dieting) makes it easier to gain weight.

Fair disclosure: I do have to make conscious, informed decisions about food, because my body does not digest anything containing wheat or cheese. That takes up the total amount of brainpower I'm usually willing to dedicate to thinking about food. What I have at home, as basic foods, are brown rice, vegetables, fruit, and nuts. I don't usually think much about food. Once a day I heat up some rice, pick out a vegetable to eat with it, prepare the vegetable, and spend the rest of the time the rice takes to cook on housekeeping chores. Then I eat my main meal for the day. Then I'm free to think about things I find more interesting. So it's possible that some dieters would not be able to do what's worked for me for all these years. Thinking about food actually stimulates the production of digestive hormones, increases appetite, and promotes weight gain...

What I recommend is exercise. I've been walking to and from almost every job, almost every day. That's what takes the weight off the hip and thigh area.

This is an overstatement, but sometimes I think it's possible to tell whether a given pound of weight was lost temporarily/unhealthily (due to reduced calorie intake) or more permanently/healthily (due to increased exercise). Weight lost by eating less comes from above the waist, especially above the cheekbones. Weight lost by exercising more comes from the hips, thighs, and abdomen. If you want to look younger rather than older when you lose weight, you have to focus on exercise.
If you want to give up using fructose, or soda pop, there are good reasons to make that choice. Soda pop is overpriced relative to its food value. Our bodies enjoy fruit flavors because our instincts are programmed to search for the nutrients in fruit; artificial fruit flavors can sabotage those instincts and unbalance our diets.

However, fructose is not the sole reason why most of us are fat, and avoiding fructose is not the most important step--or necessarily even a helpful step--toward maintaining a healthy weight.

As a person who cut all the artificial fructose out of my diet, gained weight, became ill, and found myself losing weight and feeling good when I put fructose back in my diet, I'm probably in a minority. And if I'd been willing to make more drastic diet changes, I would probably have lost the weight and felt better without using fructose-sweetened soda pop. I can even imagine some point in some hypothetical future when I might rebalance my diet in a way that does not include soda pop. But the fact remains: I wasn't willing to make those drastic changes, and for me fructose has been part of maintaining a healthy weight and energy level.

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