Boonsri Dickinson

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A common sugar in soda will make you fat

By Boonsri Dickinson | Mar 22, 2010 | 5 Comments

Put down that soda. The same goes for processed foods. Princeton University scientists are pointing their fingers at high-fructose corn syrup for their plump rats. When the researchers put rats on a high-fructose corn syrup diet and put other rats on a table sugar diet, the rats on the fructose diet gained more weight despite being fed the same caloric intake.

After a 6 month study of rats, one thing is clear: The high-fructose corn syrup that is making the rats obese. The rats on the fructose diet gained 48 percent more weight. The researchers put this in human terms: This would be like a 200 pound man putting on 96 pounds. Yikes.

Princeton’s psychology professor Bart Hoebel says “this is the first long term study in rats, showing the animals become obese relative to rats on chow or rats on 10 percent sucrose. The rats kept becoming more obese, especially the male rats.”

In the first experiment, the researchers focused on seeing what would happen to rats when their water was sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup with regular rat chow versus when they were fed table sugar with the rat chow. Not surprisingly, the rats on the high-fructose corn syrup put on more weight.

The longer study looked at the build up of fat and measured the triglyceride levels in the rats. According to the scientists, “rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly.”

In a previous study, University of North Carolina researchers found that high-fructose corn syrup may be linked to the obesity epidemic in America. Why? Glucose and fructose are digested differently — fructose gets digested more quickly into fat.

High-fructose corn syrup made its way into our food 40 years ago and it continues to dominate the sugar of choice in our food chain. In 1970, less than one percent of sweeteners were high-fructose corn syrup. But today, high-fructose corn syrup can be found in everything from sodas to baked goods to dairy products to canned fruits to cereals.

“A person on a weight loss diet or weight maintenance diet who is drinking soda with high-fructose corn syrup, should seriously consider exercising more or drinking a soda with sucrose or no sugar at all,” says Hoebel.

Image: Princeton

 
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  •  
    1

    Cornrefiner

    03/22/10 | Report as spam

    RE: A common sugar in soda will make you fat

    Princeton researchers used grossly exaggerated intake levels and incorrectly suggested their results could have significant meaning for humans in their recent rat study on obesity and high fructose corn syrup.

    Translating the study?s reported rat intakes to human proportions, the calories gained from high fructose corn syrup would be equivalent to about 3000 kcal/day all from that single source. In comparison, adult humans consume about 2,000 calories per day from all dietary sources. Such intake levels would be the equivalent of humans drinking a total of 20 cans of 12 ounce sodas per day - a highly unrealistic amount. Moreover, the researchers concluded that the rats gained more weight from high fructose corn syrup than they would have from sugar, yet they failed to provide sucrose controls for part of the study?s short-term experiments and no sucrose controls whatsoever were present in any of the long-term experiments.

    No metabolic effects have been found in studies that compare sugar and high fructose corn syrup consumption in humans.

    For more information, please visit www.SweetSurprise.com.

    Audrae Erickson, Corn Refiners Association

  •  
    2

    vulpine@...

    03/23/10 | Report as spam

    RE: A common sugar in soda will make you fat

    I can make this very simple.

    My wife used to drink 2 litres of a name-brand soda on a
    daily basis, sweetened with HFCS. She weighed over 300
    pounds. She got tired of her high weight and stopped
    drinking soda entirely, switching over to plain water with a
    bit of lemon juice for flavoring. Her weight dropped 60
    pounds within a year by that one change alone.

    What some people may not realize is just how much soda
    they drink on an average day. If you go through a 12-pack
    of soda in only a week, that's obviously 2 cans a day. I've
    seen people go through that much in just 1 or 2 days.

    Come on, people. The problem is obvious to anyone with
    eyes.

  •  
    3

    cburkitt

    03/23/10 | Report as spam

    Confused

    "The rats on the fructose diet gained 48 percent more weight. The researchers put this in human terms: This would be like a 200 pound man putting on 96 pounds."

    The context suggests that the rats on a fructose diet gained 48% more weight than those on a sucrose diet. For example, if rats on sucrose gained 10 grams, the fructose rats would gain 14.8 grams. That is NOT like a 200 pound man putting on 96 pounds. It is like a 200-pound man on a sucrose diet gaining 10 pounds, while his fructose counterpart gains 14.8 pounds.

    What is unclear is whether "48% more" means more than weighed previously or more than the control group.

  •  
    4

    DanaBlankenhorn

    03/23/10 | Report as spam

    ADM and the law

    The development of high fructose corn syrup by ADM in the mid-1970s allowed the U.S. to maintain high sugar tariffs, mainly as part of our effort against Cuba, a major sugar producer.

    Mass production followed, and U.S. food processors are now highly dependent on cheap HFCS.

    Even if the sugar tariff were lifted, I suspect HFCS at this point would be highly competitive with it, in terms of price.

    But I switched for the taste. Coca-Cola is now allowing importation of Mexican Coca Cola, which uses cane sugar. I tried it. It was excellent, even though I suspect they used "New Coke" syrup (artificial syrup) rather than the "real vanilla" of Coca-Cola Classic I grew up with.

    More soon at Rethinking Healthcare. Great piece, Boonsri.

  •  
    5

    stilt21

    03/23/10 | Report as spam

    RE: A common sugar in soda will make you fat

    mexican coca cola is coke as in the u.s. but using sugar not corn syrup. it taste sweeter but the base syrup is the same.
    sugar is cheap around the world. the use of corn syrup was caused by the high tariff on imported sugar. take away the tariff and we will return to sugar for many things taste differently, witness coke.
    obesit is not just a function of corn syrup use. obesity in mexico is endemic even with out the fructose syrup. blaming it all on one thing , as the mentioned study seems to is pure BS, and bad science

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A common sugar in soda will make you fat: “A person on a weight loss diet or weight maintenance diet who is drinki... http://bit.ly/dgoeqv
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A common sugar in soda will make you fat: The longer study looked at the build up of fat and measured the triglyce... http://bit.ly/dgoeqv
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Boonsri Dickinson

Boonsri Dickinson is a science journalist, blogger, and producer based in New York City. She's a runner, explorer, and traveler. Her work has appeared in Discover magazine, The Huffington Post, Forbes, Nature Biotech, Technewsdaily.com, Techstartups.com and AOL. Boonsri graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in chemical engineering and wanted to stay in school as long as possible, so she attended the University of Colorado at Boulder. There, she received a master's in chemical engineering and immediately moved to New York for its media scene. Follow her on Twitter.

Boonsri Dickinson

Boonsri Dickinson is an independent journalist whose reporting and opinions are not influenced by any financial holdings.
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