We weren’t so sure, until we came across a passage in Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. In the book, we learned that refined sugar became an affordable commodity in the late 19th century. By the end of that century, fully one sixth of calories in the English diet came from sugar. Armed with the knowledge that sugar is half fructose, the book contains the following footnote:
Fructose is metabolized differently from glucose; the body doesn’t respond to it by producing insulin to convey it into cells to be used as energy. Rather, it is metabolized in the liver, which turns it first into glucose and then, if there is no call for glucose, into triglycerides — fat.
– Michael Pollan. In Defense of Food. New York: Penguin, 2008. 111-112.
This seems to make sense to us. Our bodies are dealing with a flood of fructose in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, which is found in soft drinks, foods, baked goods and other manufactured products. However, not everyone is convinced, and there are other sides to the argument.
Additional Resources
More about Amy and Scott Dawson, creators of Lunchtaker.com: One of our core focuses is on nutrition and fitness. Our children both attended a parent cooperative pre-school where the morning snack was as healthy as possible, and our family liked the opportunities for new foods that arose in pre-school. As our children go through grade school, we are focusing on continuing the trend of ensuring we feed ourselves a variety of foods, all good for our bodies... read more...
Posted Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 8:31 am and filed under Education, Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
CNN reports today: “Acolytes of “Food Rules” guru Michael Pollan and other well-meaning foodies who’ve made corn a scapegoat for the nation’s health crises, this week welcomed a new study from Princeton University that suggests high-fructose corn syrup causes more significant weight gain than table sugar.”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/03/25/corn.syrup.sugar