We learn a lot about nutrition when someone is lying in a hospital bed and must get all the nutrition through a feeding tube.
They are helpless, and they’re not consuming anything except the food that is being fed through a feeding tube into their Stomach.
So this brings me to one of the most demonized foods of all today, which is sugar. Especially fructose.
As you may know, there are two main types of sugar. Glucose and fructose.
Glucose and fructose both taste sweet. But they are metabolized differently. And they are common in many different foods.
Fructose is named that way because it is more common in fruit.
Although fruit also contains glucose.
And ordinary table sugar contains both glucose and fructose. In equal amounts.
Lately, however, the food industry has gotten very big on high fructose corn syrup. It’s sweeter and cheaper, then just using sugar.
And some nutritionists and dietitians believe that consumption of too much fructose is resulting in the obesity epidemic.
This study argues that that is not so.
feeding fructose to patients in the hospital showed more benefit than feeding them glucose.
They fed some patients glucose, and some fructose, along with their normal nutrition fed through a feeding tube.
They found that the fructose patients did a lot better. And here’s why.
When you give someone glucose, he raises insulin levels dramatically. And, the result is often an increase in free fatty acids in the blood.
It is these free fatty acids that are now more and more tied to type II diabetes.
So if you can feed people in a way that does not increase free fatty acids, and does not increase insulin, you reduce diabetic complications, and you also get them closer to a healthy state.
In this study, fructose patients did much better, had lower insulin levels, and had fewer complications.
The benefits of fructose-specific metabolic effects reported in the literature and corroborated by the results of our own study suggest that fructose is an important nutrient that contributes to metabolic stabilization
I believe that as more studies are done, they will begin to show the benefits of fructose.
Fruit is been shown to be very viable because it restricts free fatty acids, lowers cortisol in the body, and does not trigger insulin.
What to do next
If you are diabetic or prediabetic, or under a doctor’s care, then you might want to talk to your doctor about adding fructose to your diet.
You may want to start using more honey, and drinking more fruit juice, and consuming more ripe fresh fruit.
All of this will increase your fructose consumption.
Remember, fructose does not trigger insulin the way that glucose does.
And fructose reduces cortisol and keeps free fatty acids down.
Fructose vs. glucose in total parenteral nutrition in critically ill patients.