Glucose is better than fructose: Study

The 32 overweight or obese men and women who participated in the study were randomly asked to consume sweetened drinks (containing fructose or glucose) to meet 25 per cent of their daily energy requirement.

In an effort to remove all intruding factors from the research, during the first and last two weeks of the study, each participant was made to undergo rigorous blood tests to determine insulin and lipid levels, among other metabolic measures, at the UCD's Clinical and Translational Science Center.

After analyzing blood tests of the two groups, researchers found that both groups had gained similar weight count by the end of 12 weeks.

However, people who consumed fructose sweetened beverages with each meal exhibited signs of unhealthy changes in liver and pancreas function and fat deposition pattern.

The fructose drinking volunteers also showed insulin insensitivity, which is one of the first signs of the onset of diabetes.

They gained more visceral fat. It is a dangerous kind of fat that embeds itself between organ tissues such as the heart and liver and releases hormones and chemicals that severely affects body's normal metabolism, which subsequently increases the risk of atherosclerosis and heart attack.

Lead researcher Peter Havel, professor of nutrition at the University of California Davis, said, "The study suggests that in the same way that not all fats are the same, not all dietary carbohydrates are the same either."

Most of the sugar present in market and restaurant products was not glucose, but rather high fructose corn syrup or sucrose (each a combination of glucose and fructose), he added.

He further maintained that it was difficult to find anything that's mostly glucose, which meant that almost all the sweeteners could contribute to weight gain, and more insidiously, metabolic changes that could make the consumer more prone to heart disease and diabetes.

Dr. Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, held that a number of studies had shown that long-term consumption of sweetened drinks could double the risk of diabetes, half of that risk emerged as a result of the excessive weight gained by the calories, and the other half due to the high sugar content (mainly fructose) in the beverages.

Matthias Tschoep, an obesity researcher at the Obesity Research Center in the University of Cincinnati, and author of a commentary accompanying the study, remarked, "This study provides the best argument yet that we should either decide to consume less sugar sweetened beverages in general, or that we should conduct more research into the possibility of using other sweeteners that may be more glucose-based."