This Substance Fools Your Metabolism and Tricks Your Body into Gaining Pounds

Is Fructose the Reason Why You’re Overweight?

If everyone could easily keep their total grams of fructose to below about 25 grams per day then I believe we would start seeing some radical changes in these crazy statistics in short order. But the key issue is that while that is theoretically possible, precious few people are actually doing it, and the reliance on processed food is the primary reason for this failure.

This is largely because the majority of fructose is hidden in all these processed foods so that it becomes very difficult to see just how much fructose you’re consuming every single day.

The average American now consumes 1/3 of a pound of sugar DAILY. That’s five ounces or 150 grams, half of which is fructose, which is 300 percent more than the amount that will trigger biochemical havoc. And many Americans consume more than twice that amount!

To put it into even further perspective, based on USDA estimates the average American consumes the equivalent of about TWO TONS of sugar during their lifetime. So is it really any wonder that the United States is the fattest of 33 countries, with a whopping 75 percent of Americans crowding into the overweight category?

Thanks to the excellent work of researchers like Dr. Robert Lustig, and Dr. Richard Johnson, we now know that fructose:

·         Is metabolized differently from glucose, with the majority being turned directly into fat

·         Tricks your body into gaining weight by fooling your metabolism, as it turns off your body’s appetite-control system. Fructose does not appropriately stimulate insulin, which in turn does not suppress ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”) and doesn’t stimulate leptin (the “satiety hormone”), which together result in your eating more and developing insulin resistance.

·         Rapidly leads to weight gain and abdominal obesity (“beer belly”), decreased HDL, increased LDL, elevated triglycerides, elevated blood sugar, and high blood pressure—i.e., classic metabolic syndrome.

·         Over time leads to insulin resistance, which is not only an underlying factor of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, but also many cancers.

According to Dr. Robert Lustig, fructose is ‘isocaloric but not isometabolic.” This means you can have the same amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different despite the identical calorie count.

This is a VERY important point so let me repeat it. Most will need to read this seven times or more to fully realize the implications of this simple yet HIGHLY profound, and radically revolutionary important statement:

Fructose is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.”

This means you can have the same amount of calories from fructose or glucose, fructose and protein, or fructose and fat, but the metabolic effect will be entirely different despite the identical calorie count.

This is largely because different nutrients provoke different hormonal responses, and those hormonal responses determine, among other things, how much fat you accumulate. This is why the idea that you can lose weight by counting calories simply doesn’t work… Even the most popular calorie-counting weight loss program, Weight Watchers, recently admitted this fact and changed their wildly successful formula. The new system instead tries to encourage dieters to consume more natural, less processed food, which I believe is the crux of any long-term weight loss program.

After fructose, other sugars and grains are likely the most excessively consumed food that promotes weight gain and chronic disease. Other sugars can easily include items that are typically viewed as healthy, such as fruit juice or even large amounts of high fructose fruits. In large amounts these items will adversely affect your insulin, which is a crucially potent fat regulator.

www.mercola.com

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...