Why fruit sugar is good for your health and processed sugar is not

Fruit is a plant food that is incorporated into all healthy diets. It is characterized, among other things, by its sweetness, especially when it has matured correctly.

That sweet taste of the fruit is due to the fact that it contains a lot of one type of sugar which, guess why, it’s called fructose!

It also contains glucose, but in much less quantity. But today we will focus on the first one, the one that could be the most harmful to our health.

Fructose is also, along with glucose, a component of white (or table) sugar and corn syrup. Both sweeteners are used as common ingredients in the preparation of processed foods, sauces and condiments, sweets and sweetened soft drinks.

And this is where the problem begins. Numerous studies associate the increase in the consumption of these products with the higher incidence of metabolic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, fatty liver and blood lipids.

Quantity and quality, two keywords

Quantity: a higher consumption of food products containing sugary sweeteners implies a higher consumption of calories. If these are not burned, they accumulate in the form of fat in the body and promote the development of metabolic diseases.

Unfortunately, the consumption of high-calorie diets, poor in fruits and vegetables and rich in fats and this type of sugar, has become global, facilitating the epidemic growth of this type of pathology.

On the other hand, if you go to the dietician or nutritionist or consult any dietary guide, you will always find the same advice: if you want to be healthy, eat some five servings of fruit and vegetables, spread over the different meals of the day.

A moderate daily consumption of a natural, unprocessed food, such as fruit, is healthy. And let’s apply common sense, we are not talking about consuming two kilos of pears and a melon a day!

Quality: fructose transforms into fat very easily in the liver. For the same amount ingested, for example, of fructose and glucose, the former produces a greater amount of fat in the liver.

In this sense, excess fructose has a greater potential to alter metabolism and facilitate the appearance of metabolic diseases than other sugars.

But then, do these pathologies also occur with the consumption of fructose from fruit?

Packaging is everything

We all know that, after all, we are evolved monkeys. For millions of years, our ancestors lived and adapted to the consumption of a varied diet, rich in vegetables and fruits that they collected throughout the day.

When we take fructose, we do not ingest it as such, isolated, but rather it is incorporated in its natural packaging (the fruit itself), with all the other components of it: fiber, minerals, vitamins, etc.

So we must chew each piece properly that we take. The goal is to mix its various components, including abundant fiber, with our saliva and digestive juices. This causes the fructose contained in the fruit to enter our body slowly.

Thus, intestinal cells consume a large majority of the fructose they absorb, so that very little of it reaches the liver through the blood to be transformed into fat.

This is how industrial sugar works in the body

When we take a large amount of fructose, present in a sweet, a sauce, an ice cream or, above all, in liquid form, in a sugary drink, the situation is very different.

We flood our digestive tract with fructose, dissolved in water, which is rapidly absorbed by intestinal cells, but to the point of overflowing them. Then it reaches the liver, where it is transformed into fat.

The liver is responsible for distributing this excess fat throughout our body. If this happens in isolation, it does not matter. But if we consume these foods abundantly and frequently, in the long run we will have health problems.

The excess fat deposited in our body could produce us obesity, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, etc.

Over time, metabolic disorders will increase the risk of a heart attack or even a cancerous process. For example, a study has recently been published in which a higher incidence of cancer is associated with the higher the consumption of sugars.

But be careful! This association only occurs with the consumption of sugars in liquid form, not in solid form. In addition, when the association between the appearance of cancer and the consumption of fruit juices is specifically studied, this is also positive: the incidence of cancer increases with greater consumption of juices.

Is fruit sugar good or bad?

So is fruit sugar good or bad? If you have read the above, you can guess the answer.

The consumption of fruit as such in our diet is healthy. That implies that we bite it, chew it, mix it with other foods, to facilitate its digestion. In this way, the components of the fruit, including fructose, are slowly incorporated into our body.

When we drink a fruit juice, even if it is natural, things change. We take much more fruit What if we had to peel, bite and chew it. In addition, as we do not take the fructose in its natural packaging, it is absorbed suddenly, quickly, reaches the liver and once there we already know what happens. Therefore, the fruit is eaten as such and the juices are a pleasure that we can allow ourselves from time to time.

And if you decide to have a juice, please don’t remove the pulp! The pulp helps the sugar of the fruit to slowly incorporate itself into our body, in a more similar way to what happens when we eat the fruit directly.

*Juan Carlos Laguna Egea is Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Barcelona and Marta Alegret Jorda is a researcher at the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutic Chemistry, University of Barcelona.

This note originally appeared on The Conversation and is published here under a Creative Commons license. You can read the original article here.

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