Support NeoGAF

[entremet]

The type of sugar you eat may affect your cravings for high-calorie foods, researchers report.

An experiment with 24 healthy volunteers found that compared with consuming glucose, consuming fructose — the sugar found in fruits, honey and corn syrup — resulted in more activity in the brain’s reward regions, increased responses to images of food and a tendency to choose eating a high-calorie food over a future monetary reward.

The volunteers drank a 10-ounce glass of cherry-flavored liquid that contained two and a half ounces of fructose or glucose. (Table sugar, or sucrose, extracted from sugar cane or sugar beets, is a compound of glucose and fructose.) Researchers also took blood samples to measure levels of glucose, fructose and insulin, and of leptin and ghrelin, enzymes involved in controlling hunger and feelings of fullness.

Before having their drinks, the participants rated their desire to eat on a one-to-10 scale from “not at all” to “very much.” Then they drank the liquids and had functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans while looking at images of food and of neutral objects like buildings or baskets. As they did so, they rated their hunger using the scale. The volunteers were then presented with images of high-calorie foods and asked whether they would like to have the food now, or a monetary award a month later instead.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, found that compared with glucose, consuming fructose produced greater responses to food cues in the orbital frontal cortex of the brain, a region that plays an important role in reward processing. The fructose drink also produced greater activity in the visual cortex when volunteers looked at images of food, a finding that suggests increased craving compared with glucose.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/...ecommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0

Study here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/04/29/1503358112

 

[Kai Dracon]

As many have said, it seems very unlikely that the sole reason for weight gain in the US is because 90% of the population became ten times as lazy at the exact same moment. (Though sedentary lifestyle is a factor.)

In hindsight I consider myself lucky; I can't stand soda with HFCS. For me the taste is very different and gross. I noticed something was wrong even as a kid and actually started drinking a few diet sodas when I wanted soda. The alt sweetener taste wasn't as bad as the high fructose corn syrup.

 

[entremet]

As many have said, it seems very unlikely that the sole reason for weight gain in the US is because 90% of the population became ten times as lazy at the exact same moment. (Though sedentary lifestyle is a factor.)

In hindsight I consider myself lucky; I can't stand soda with HFCS. For me the taste is very different and gross. I noticed something was wrong even as a kid and actually started drinking a few diet sodas when I wanted soda. The alt sweetener taste wasn't as bad as the high fructose corn syrup.

I'm a big fan of food reward theory, which obesity researcher Stephan Guyenet posited.

It's also documented in the book Salt, Sugar, Fat.

Here's an NPR interview on it

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/20...ry-manipulates-taste-buds-with-salt-sugar-fat

But yes, when you combine foods that are engineered to make us eat more of them and also more calorie dense--which is advantageous to food makers bottom line--and sedentary lifestyles, staying slim requires more effort than not.

This is the first in history where this is the case.

Our grandparents generation had much less obesity and they also had less gym participation and no fad diets.

 

[ItIsOkBro]

Something about metabolizing glucose signals something in your brain to make you stop eating; this doesn't happen with fructose.

 

[big_z]

Something about metabolizing glucose signals something in your brain to make you stop eating; this doesn't happen with fructose.

It does for me as it tends to make me feel bloated and sick the more I consume. I tend to leave sweets until after the meal because they kill my appetite.

Stuff like Splenda doesn't doesnt cause this issue but eating too much leaves a bad aftertaste.

 

[ZealousD]

Before anybody thinks this is damning of HFCS in particular, know that regular table sugar also contains about 50% Fructose, which is pretty close to the same amount of fructose in HFCS.

 

[JimboJones]

Fructose and sucrose is much sweeter than plain glucose though so wouldn't you end up using less sugar?

I bought a bag of glucose a while back just for curiosity sake and you needed to use like three times as much to even approach the same levels of sucrose sweetness.