Does fruit sugar cause you to gain weight?

Does fruit sugar cause you to gain weight?

Fruit sugar, or fructose, is public enemy number one with virtually all alternative and mainstream doctors agreeing:

Fructose causes obesity, fructose causes insulin resistance, fructose causes heart disease, fructose causes diabetes.

And the worst culprit is high fructose corn syrup, because it contains so much fructose, and is sweetening all kinds of beverages in the United States especially, where corn and corn products are heavily subsidized.

High fructose corn syrup is very bad.

Well, that’s the current narrative. But what if some of that or all of that is not true?

Especially fructose.

After all

Fructose has been eaten for millions of years

And was designed like fructose, because it sweetens fruit!

And why would something that tastes good be so bad for us?

I’m not the only one that wondered this. There have been a lot of real researchers that have been looking into fructose and supposedly affect on body weight and insulin resistance and obesity.

One of these studies is a made analysis of many other studies and includes lots of impressive people and lots of important data.

It’s not my favorite kind of study by a longshot. It doesn’t test anything itself, it only reports on other people studies, and it gives the researchers a lot of room for hidden biases.

They can exclude certain studies, or include other studies.

So it’s important to look for this bias in these kinds of meta-analysis studies.

Effect of Fructose on Body Weight in Controlled Feeding Trials: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

So let me just say that there are a ton of biases here.

Almost all the researchers are collecting money from food companies. So this is a very heavily biased study. I just want to mention that.

However, it still has some value so let’s keep looking at it.

Although we will heavily discount as a result of all the researchers being paid by the food and the drug companies.

Let’s see what they did:

At least three reviewers identified controlled feeding trials lasting 7 or more days that compared the effect on body weight of free fructose and nonfructose carbohydrate in diets providing similar calories (isocaloric trials) or of diets supplemented with free fructose to provide excess energy and usual or control diets (hypercaloric trials).

Trials evaluating high-fructose corn syrup (42% to 55% free fructose) were excluded.

Here is a graphic showing what they reviewed and analyzed:

Graph of the reports

I don’t have any problem with this.

They looked at a bunch of studies and excluded studies that were working with high fructose corn syrup.

They concluded:

Fructose does not seem to cause weight gain when it is substituted for other carbohydrates in diets providing similar calories. 

This is not surprising.

I recently showed you some studies that indicated that higher sugar consumption results in lower body weight, and less obesity. The effect was most pronounced with ordinary sugar, and less so with glucose.

Fructose was relatively neutral in that study.

And in any event, consuming a lot of sugar of any kind does not seem to cause weight gain.

Obviously, for a so-called hyper calorie diet, where the people or the rats are given enormous amounts of sugar vastly beyond what they normally would consume, they will get fatter.

But it takes quite a lot to get fat on sugar. And you don’t get diabetes from sugar.

I believe that sugar is a metabolic booster, which our cells can easily use sugar and convert it into energy.

And something else that is not very well known.

When you consume sugar, it’s tough for your body to convert the sugar into fat.

This sugar into fat conversion process is called de novo lipogenesis. Or DNL. And DNL is very inefficient and difficult.

So for that reason, consuming large amounts of sugar does not increase body weight. This is one of many studies that show that.

What is the study is, is in agreement with many other studies on the same subject.

It just shows that sugar is not the demon is made out to be.

Here’s the trouble sugar in our world

When you consume sugar, most of the time you’re also consuming donuts, or cakes, or cookies, and these all contain large amounts of PUFAs, polyunsaturated fatty acids, such as vegetable oil, canola oil, soybean oil, and so food products.

If you consume a lot of natural sugar through say ripe fruit, good quality fruit juice, honey, etc., then this study does show indeed that you have nothing to worry about regarding weight gain.

—————

 

 

 

 

 


Matt Cook is editor-in-chief of Daily Medical Discoveries. Matt has been a full time health researcher for 26 years. ABC News interviewed Matt on sexual health issues not long ago. Matt is widely quoted on over 1,000,000 websites. He has over 300,000 daily newsletter readers. Daily Medical Discoveries finds hidden, buried or ignored medical studies through the lens of 100 years of proven science. Matt heads up the editorial team of scientists and health researchers. Each discovery is based upon primary studies from peer reviewed science sources following the Daily Medical Discoveries 7 Step Process to ensure accuracy.
Daily Medical Discoveries has strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical associations. We avoid using tertiary references. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. To continue reading about sugar from fruits and other topics that pertain to men, click here. If you’d like further information, feel free to check out these references: Click for more information on Fructose, for information on Diet & Exercise, or for more on effects of Fructose.