Article: Your brain on sugar

This is your brain on sugar - for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.
 
rpm said:
This is your brain on sugar - for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.
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It saturates all countries' diets. Table sugar is sucrose which is a glucose - fructose dissacharride. HCFS (high fructose corn syrup) slightly higher in fructose and added to most fruit juice concentrates and soft drinks too depending on manufacturing. Fruit of course has fructose as the sugar but in solid form the fruit has lots of fibre etc relative to the fructose and that balances out the 'fullness' etc.
Fructose also has a different pathway to glucose in the liver. If you only had fructose available for energy then that's going to get used of course- no probs. If you have enough glucose (from glycogen etc plus simple sugars) then that will be used for energy...any excess will be eventually converted to fat. Excess fructose however will have a different pathway to the fat and raise your bad cholesterol. Which is why you can have people eating fats vs people drinking lots of fruit juice and coke with the former having lower cholesterol (assuming they have the same genetic propensity to 'make' cholesterol).

So the nutrition debate keeps evolving in terms of what are the good and bad actors.
 
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