All of the info about why added sugar is unhealthy compared to fruits seems to be that the sugar in fruit comes with fibre and nutrients that offset the negative health impacts of sugar to a degree by delaying its absorption and preventing a blood sugar spike.
However, by this reasoning alone, wouldn’t it be possible to infer that if added sugar was paired with the same amount of fibre and nutrients, its effects could be mitigated in the same way as they are in fruit?
Well I haven’t found any evidence either supporting or negating this idea or anyone even talking about that question specifically aside from a few other people asking the same thing, and random people replying without citing any evidence. For example someone suggested that indeed taking this approach may work a little bit, but it still won’t be as healthy as eating fruit due to the “fibre-infused food matrix” of fruit or that sugar that is found naturally in fruits is “complexed” with fiber that slows down the absorption more, whereas the added sugar is more freely available to absorb quickly because it’s separate from the fibre even if eaten together with it (though the separate fibre will still do some of the same job but not as well)?
“It can slow the absorption of sugar slightly but won’t make a huge difference. Sugar from wholefruit and veg will always be processed differently due to the food matrix the sugars contained in that must be vroken down resulting in a slow and gradual release, when u eat added sugar but just have some fiber all that sugar is still there readily available to absorb. Overall it would be better to just stick to fruit and eat mixed macro meals with healthy unsaturated fats and proteins”
Well if possible I would like to see some scientific evidence/studies talking specifically about the difference on the body between consuming whole fruits containing their natural sugar and fibre + nutrients, compared to consuming added sugar along with foods containing fibre and nutrients in equivalent amounts (such as bircher muesli with added palm sugar, or another example if necessary for the sake of equalizing the fibre+nutrients content), and ideally health outcome data showing there is actually a difference between these…
And just more information in general about the idea of naturally occurring sugar and fibre contained together in a single food matrix being different/more healthy than added sugar taken together with separate fibre foods.
Thanks
This thread is going reveal to a lot of people just how bad the science around sugar is right now.
Generally speaking, the point is not to consume too much and that would be nice except oops! our economic system is based on excessive consumption and sugar is kind of a really cheap ingredient to just add to make your food, so lets do a bunch of mental gymnastics so we don’t have to explain why it’s legal to sell canned diabetes with its 900 grams per can.
I’m sure you’ve noticed this before, but every convenience store in America sells addiction: Sugary candy/donuts/soda, diet soda, salty snacks, tobacco, gambling, caffeine, alcohol, energy drinks. I think the only thing nobody’s addicted to in a convenience store is…beef jerky. But hey, to each their own, snap into that Slim Jim if you crave it.
Literally everything they sell though is someone’s serious addiction. Hell, you could even frame gasoline as an addiction since most of us rely on it completely to get to work.
A youtuber, forgot who, did a great video showing how we’ve shifted to an addiction economy and as hot of a take as that is, it makes a lot of sense. You’re not allowed to just buy stuff and be happy anymore. You have to keep buying things over and over and you’re still not satisfied.
To offer insight on store jerky; it keeps forever and the profit margins are astronomical for what it costs to make.
I’ve been telling people for years to stop and think about a convenience store as only selling things that people are addicted to: salty snacks, cigarettes, alcohol, sugary soda, chocolate, donuts, gambling through lottery tickets, hell even gasoline since we are all addicted to driving.
As a side note, apparently eating too much fruit of the type that can ferment may act the same as alcohol and fuck up your liver.
Even too much water can be bad
I drowned in it, once.
“…I got better.”
Lol just try it yourself. Pound some white sugar and psyllium husks and see how you feel afterwards.
Psyllium husks sounds like something I would pick up in Helldivers and I was about to invite you to spread some Democracy while we give them a taste of freedom.
This recipe turned out great! I didn’t have any psyllium husks so I substituted psilocybin, and I didn’t have a pound of sugar so I substituted a pound of cocaine. The recipe still is great. So great. Like the best recipe anyone has ever made ever. I love you so much, but if you cross me I don’t know what I would do
Okay Cocaine Bear, let’s get you to bed, hon.
My fist hurts, what else was supposed to happen?
You were supposed to give it a good pounding. I need a cigarette.
Well if possible I would like to see some scientific evidence/studies talking specifically about the difference on the body between consuming whole fruits containing their natural sugar and fibre + nutrients, compared to consuming added sugar along with foods containing fibre and nutrients in equivalent amounts
I remember I saw this somewhere around the release of The Martian, because it comes up there that he subsides mostly on vitamine pills + potatoes.
It should be functionally the same, assuming you take in all constituend components in the correct amounts. Because then of course for your stomach/colon, there’s absolutely no difference any more.
But as far as replacing specific elements goes and swapping them out for analoguous components… ouff, no clue, can’t find the paper any more. For example when you say “added sugar” you probably mean table sugar, right? That’s not the same sugar as fruit sugar. Might make a difference, might not, not sure.
Different types of sugar are digested at different rates, even if they all taste sweet. Glucose, fructose, sucrose, even allulose are found in fruits I’m different amounts and are all suggested differently. There are also various starches that change digestion taste and some of that (not not all) break down into sugars with amylase in saliva. Different kinds of starches break down at different rates and are digested differently and can alter the sugar absorption. Different kinds of fibers feed different kinds of things in your gut biome and are processed differently by your body too. Those are just the basic categories of carbohydrates without going into details of the different roles they play in digestion.
Fruits, veg, whole grains, all have different nutrient profiles and your body treats them differently. Consuming a multivitamin with fiber supplement and sugar may get your caloric and some vitamin needs met but you will be missing many other things that a diet with a broad variety of foods can offer.
How’s that guy beating protein starvation? I assume they’re also taking iron alongside their other vitamins and not just a single over-the-counter multivitamin. I do know that starch is probably one of the best forms of sugar you can have so they got that one on the money.
Holy crap, don’t get your dietary advice from this place apparently.
I mean I get it but try to be constructive. Commenting “this is wrong” and then walking away is the pure dietary sugar of discussions.
The advice is wank, from people who don’t know jack about this. And yes, I know - I don’t, either. That is why I don’t try to answer questions on hugely complicated fields I don’t know. Almost nobody even considered posting a source for anything and that is a huge red flag in a question that is basically about science.
Given that the advice is off-topic, wrong, potentially risky or some combination, I am not wrong about the general sentiment. If you wanted me to phrase it some other way, maybe you could’ve been more, uh, constructive.
After all, commenting “this is the pure dietary sugar of discussions” and then walking away is the pure dietary sugar of discussions.
Specifically, if you’re positive something is wrong, I don’t think it’s a big ask if you’re going to be commenting already to include the part that’s wrong 🤷♂️ honestly not trying to be a dick about it, just sayin.
Added sugar is bad because we don’t need all the sugar we tipically consume.
Eating fruits is healthier because you eat other nutrients (such as vitamins) and fibers that fill you faster make you eat less (while providing other benefits to your gastrointestinal system). A pure friot juice is more filling, contains more nutrients and less calories than sugary water with fruit additives and colorants, because as other said pure sugar is pure energy but doesn’t have nutrients, only calories. If you consume very little it’s the same (only as in calories) as eating a larger amount of fruits, but the little part is the problem usually.
Eating too much fruit is also unhealthy, and can still be diabetic, it’s just much harder, more expensive and less convenient to consume unhralthy amounts of food rather than sugar.
Bio-availability matters. The sugars that are bound with the fibre matter. The fact that the sugar is so concentrated and processed matters.
In order for it to be the same, you’d need to bind the sugars to the fibres because those linkages matter afaik. So you CAN do it, but the process required would basically entail recreating the fruit.
Now I’m talking WAY out of my depth here, but the information is around
Nice citation. TY!
Addendum, this is also why multivitamins are sketchy at best.
It’s great you’re getting vitamins, but in this format, your body can’t really absorb much of them (if any)
I know this, but:
0.05(multivitamin) > jack shit
Entirely!
I’m not saying don’t take them.
I’m saying “eat your veggies anyways”
Totally, I’m just admitting that I’m someone that eats like shit lol.
Fair lol.
I mean I’m replying from a rib place right now soooo…. Yeah
If you were dead set on this experiment, I wonder if you could avoid recreating fruit, by simply having a lesser amount of the added sugar commensurate with how much of it you would end up absorbing if consuming fruit instead.
So you’d make a vegetable?
Haha, well presumably not because the OP’s proposed substitute food made from fruit/vegetable constituents isn’t the same thing as fruit/vegetable at least in part because the sugars are not bound to the fibre as you say. If my theory was correct, and OP put the correct amount less sugar in to their weird food substitute mix they’d end up with nutritional the equivelant of some kind of fruit which has more, but less freely available, sugar. If that reduced amount of sugar ended up equal to the amount of sugar in a vegetable, presumably the same principle would apply, whereby the sugar content might be equal in weight to an equivalent vegetable, but because of the relative availability of that sugar were it in vegetable form, your food substitute mix would have to be even less sugar (or just none) to be a vegetable, although presumably it still wouldn’t be one given it’s just constituent elements not bound together in to a form recognisable as a vegetable.
I’m WAY beyond my depth to comment on this at all.
I understand the version you could draw with a crayon you intended to eat.
Oh. Ouch. Sorry mate I wasn’t trying to imply I had any expertise. Just trying to follow conclusions for amusement. If it’s not clear, I’m not OP, I’m not trying to do whatever wacky thing they’re trying to do. I’ll take it from your apparent anger this has ceased to be amusing for you before it did for me so I’ll leave it there and not bother you any more.
I do like that last barb though, even if directed at my expense, if I can ever find a scenario that suits I might have to steal that.
Oh, I’m not upset! It was just meant to be funny at my own personal expense and let you know that I have NO idea.
My bad! All good. I just have no idea how most of this works
As someone who was very into Keto dieting for a while I have some experience with this research - however I am just a nerd who likes details and not a professional dietician or nutritionist so this is only using internet articles available via Google for my statements.
Sucrose is the freely available white sugar that is called “sugar” for cooking/baking. It is 99% carbohydrate energy and has been cleaned through processing to remove all but the sucrose. It has no added benefits other than being freely available energy.
Fructose is a sugar formed naturally in fruits. Fructose is unprocessed sugar (not Raw but completely untouched and still requiring extraction from the fruit flesh. Raw is just a marketing term for cheap processed sugar). Since it is only available by eating fruit, there is the associated idea that it must be better. It isn’t as bad as sugar but it isn’t healthy.
Sucrose is made of fructose and glucose, so the argument that it is easier to break down fructose might be made. Fructose can only be broken down in the liver while sucrose is absorbed by the liver, gallbladder, spleen, and intestines. Given this narrow window of fructose availability, it is likely healthier than sugar because of the short exposure time to fructose.
So to answer your question, sucrose infused with fiber and nutrients is not the same as fructose available from plants. Separating the components is more intensive for fruit and fructose than trying to separate the easily mixed sugar and additives.
Frequency matters. Natural fruits are not always available.
That being said you can get diabetes by eating bananas all the time, nothing magic about natural fructose. Sugar isn’t great for you, it increases you blood sugar, and by consequence your insulin levels. Prolonged high insulin levels are highly correlated with modern health issues.
Not all sucrose is created equally.
This is a nice opinion! Do you have any source for this? Or would you care to explain it a bit more?
That’s not an opinion. An opinion is “I don’t like hamburgers.”
Types of sugars are facts.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-to-know-about-different-types-names-sugar
There’s a lot of types of sugars and it’s worth it to know the difference. Table sugar is not the same as an orange, which isn’t the same as a sugary drink. They are all different types of sugars that hit the gut in different ways and require different processes to digest.
Now that’s an answer, thank you.
Scientific evidence does defend it as a fact. But your first message was far from providing the evidence that OP was asking for.
So when you said sucrose you really meant various sugars. Because sucrose is a molecule and all the same, and what it comes with is what makes the difference, as per OP’s question.
It was an opinion until you linked evidence
“The sky is red.” isn’t an opinion, its a wrong fact.
Without evidence it’s nothing more than a baseless speculation. Looks red to me and my buddies, got proofs pour contraire? No? Then it’s as red as any other colour. This is how misinformation spreads. You either think critically or you don’t.
Maybe the better word here instead of opinion is “hypothesis”. “The sky is red” is a hypothesis. It’s worth nothing until you prove it disprove it but it is a basis for reasoning.
Fair
One is much easier to prove or commonly know than the other
Fructose is less of a spiker to your bloodsugar than glucose. Burns slower
