The article itself clocks in at 9 pages, but it’s worth reading all the way through.  In particular, reading the full article leads to the last two pages, which contain some possible connections that I had not seen until this article.  Truly scary stuff.

Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain

From the summary:

This creates a fascinating puzzle. The rats in the Princeton study became obese by drinking high-fructose corn syrup, but not by drinking sucrose. The critical differences in appetite, metabolism and gene expression that underlie this phenomenon are yet to be discovered, but may relate to the fact that excess fructose is being metabolized to produce fat, while glucose is largely being processed for energy or stored as a carbohydrate, called glycogen, in the liver and muscles.

This seems consistent. For the long story on how the body metabolizes fructose and glucose, see my previous post on Sugar. Once again, a long video, but worth the journey.

What’s interesting here is that people have long considered HFCS and sucrose (sugar) to be more or less equivalent in terms of metabolic processes. This study suggests this might not be the case.

See also: similar results from artificial sweeteners.

Original Post. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.

(Thanks to Deb for finding this!)

A friend of mine recently posted a link to a pretty interesting article about an animal model meant to observe the effects of artificial sweeteners on rats. Here’s the money quote:

Even though the saccharin-sweetened yogurt group actually got fewer calories from their yogurt, they gained more weight than the group fed yogurt sweetened with glucose (Swithers & Davidson, 2008; Swithers, Baker, & Davidson, 2009). At the end of 5 weeks of study, the saccharin-fed rats had also gotten significantly fatter than the glucose-fed rats.

With my own body I know that there is some kind of expectation created by texture and flavor when you’re eating a specific food. In my experience, eating artificial sweeteners often makes me hungrier. And after eating a relatively natural diet based on foods that I can recognize, eating something that includes processed ingredients and artificial sweeteners is a shocking experience once I’ve consumed it. I can tell my body doesn’t really know how to react.

If this is something that interests you I also strongly suggest watching the video in my post on sugar by Dr. Robert Lustig as well as the video of Michael Pollan speaking at the Long Now Foundation. These are both long attention span posts, but they are worth your time to understand the world of food we live in.

(I’m aware that there’s some Confirmation Bias in my selection here, but evidence does seem to be aligning with my own personal experience, the experiences of my peers and large groups of people as well – see the videos for more information on the effects of sugar and processed foods.)

In this video, Dr. Robert Lustig goes through the science behind how sugar and its component parts, glucose and fructose, are processed in the body and what that means for everything we know about the US’s (and the world’s, for that matter) ever growing waistline. This talk shows why all calories are not created equal.

Like many good things in this world, it’s a long story, packed with information so you will have to put aside time to absorb it. But it’s worth your time if you ever wanted to understand why sugar makes you feel the way that it does and why it specifically results in weight gain vs. other types of carbohydrates, fats or protein.

Watch it on YouTube if you don’t see a video above. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.

It’s also a day that we eat a lot of food.

Earlier today I watched this talk on Deep Agriculture given by Michael Pollan given at The Long Now foundation. He’s best known for his books which include The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This video is long, but worth listening to. It contains some absolutely fascinating anecdotes about our food system today and feels about right for the day when we celebrate the harvest.

Enjoy!

Michael Pollan: “Deep Agriculture”. Available under BY-NC-SA, copyright The Long Now Foundation.