How corn syrup might be making us hungry and fat

[Hum]

Grocery store aisles are awash in foods and beverages that contain high-fructose corn syrup. It is common in sodas and crops up in everything from ketchup to snack bars. This cheap sweetener has been an increasingly popular additive in recent decades and has often been fingered as a driver of the obesity epidemic.

These fears may be well founded. Fructose, a new study finds, has a marked affect on the brain region that regulates appetite, suggesting that corn syrup and other forms of fructose might encourage over-eating to a greater degree than glucose. Table sugar has both fructose and glucose, but high-fructose corn syrup, as the name suggests, contains a higher proportion of fructose.

To test how fructose affects the brain, researchers studied 20 healthy adult volunteers. While the test subjects consumed sweetened beverages, the researchers used fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure the response of the hypothalamus, which helps regulate many hunger-related signals, as well as reward and motivation processing.

Volunteers received a 300-milliliter cherry-flavored drink sweetened with 75 grams (equivalent to about 300 calories) of fructose as well as the same drink sweetened with the same amount of glucose. These different drinks were given, in random order, at sessions one to eight months apart. The researchers also took blood samples at various time points and asked volunteers to rate their feelings of hunger and fullness.

Subjects showed substantial differences in their hypothalamic activity after consuming the fructose-sweetened beverage versus the one sweetened by glucose within 15 minutes. Glucose lowered the activity of the hypothalamus but fructose actually prompted a small spike to this area. As might be expected from these results, the glucose drink alone increased the feelings of fullness reported by volunteers, which indicates that they would be less likely to consume more calories after having something sweetened with glucose than something sweetened with more fructose.

Fructose and glucose look similar molecularly, but fructose is metabolized differently by the body and prompts the body to secrete less insulin than does glucose (insulin plays a role in telling the body to feel full and in dulling the reward the body gets from food). Fructose also fails to reduce the amount of circulating ghrelin (a hunger-signaling hormone) as much as glucose does. (Animal studies have shown that fructose can, indeed, cross the blood-brain barrier and be metabolized in the hypothalamus.) Previous studies have shown that this effect was pronounced in animal models.

The study, led by Kathleen Page, of Yale University School of Medicine and was published online January 1 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association.

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[DocM]

1) "high" fructose syrup is 55% fructose & 45% glucose, the same as the honey pushed by so many "food experts." Regular table sugar is 50% fructose & 50% glucose. Difference: not much.

2) small study. Call back when it's been repeated several times with identical results. Even so, the study itself showed no causal link to anything, just a delay in satiation. See 3)

3) HFCS isn't a boogeyman. Reduce all sugar & refined carb intake. Eat more protein & complex carbs. Fixed.

[Hum]

So orange juice will make me fat ? :laugh: NOT.

I never want more than a little fruit juice at a time -- same with soda, for that matter.

Researchers are forgetting that people are not just 'brain driven'.

[M_Lyons10]

Very interesting. A shame that it likely won't change anything... :(

[theyarecomingforyou]

I thought the dangers of HFCS were already well-known? It's one of the factors behind America's obesity epidemic, though certainly not the only factor - the UK is also a very obese nation and HFCS isn't used much here. The only reason it's used so much in America is because it has been heavily subsidised.

[DocM]

......the UK is also a very obese nation and HFCS isn't used much here......

Which argues against the study. As I said honey has the same composition of sugars, and fruits are loaded with fructose. Gonna restrict them too?