Posted on 04/21/2010 2:21:20 PM PDT by neverdem
High fructose corn syrup, which is linked to obesity, may also be harmful to the liver, according to Duke University Medical Center research.
“We found that increased consumption of high fructose corn syrup was associated with scarring in the liver, or fibrosis, among patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD),” said Manal Abdelmalek, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology/Hepatology at Duke University Medical Center.
Her team of researchers at Duke, one of eight clinical centers in the Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis Clinical Research Network, looked at 427 adults enrolled in the network. They analyzed dietary questionnaires collected within three months of the adults’ liver biopsies to determine their high fructose corn syrup intake and its association with liver scarring.
The researchers found only 19 percent of adults with NAFLD reported no intake of fructose-containing beverages, while 52 percent consumed between one and six servings a week and 29 percent consumed fructose-containing beverages on a daily basis.
An increase in consumption of fructose appeared to be correlated to increased liver fibrosis in patients with NAFLD.
“We have identified an environmental risk factor that may contribute to the metabolic syndrome of insulin resistance and the complications of the metabolic syndrome, including liver injury,” Abdelmalek said.
Research Abdelmalek published in the Journal of Hepatology in 2008 showed that, within a small subset of patients, high fructose corn syrup was associated with NAFLD. Her latest research, published online in Hepatology, goes one step further and links high fructose corn syrup to the progression of liver injury.
“Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is present in 30 percent of adults in the United States,” Abdelmalek said. “Although only a minority of patients progress to cirrhosis, such patients are at increased risk for liver failure, liver cancer, and the need for liver transplant,” she explained.
“Unfortunately, there is no therapy for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease,” she said. “My hope is to see if we can find a factor, such as increased consumption of high fructose corn syrup, which, if modified, can decrease the risk of liver disease.”
The idea is similar to what cardiologists have done for heart patients, Abdelmalek explained. They discovered that high-fat diets are bad for your heart, so they have promoted low-fat diets to decrease the risk of heart disease, she said.
“We haven’t made it that far with liver disease yet,” Abdelmalek said. “We know that alcohol is not good for your liver, and therefore encourage patients to limit alcohol consumption. But what do you do when people have non-alcoholic liver disease?”
“Our findings suggest that we may need to go back to healthier diets that are more holistic,” Abdelmalek said. “High fructose corn syrup, which is predominately in soft-drinks and processed foods, may not be as benign as we previously thought.”
The consumption of fructose has increased exponentially since the early 1970s, and with this rise, an increase in obesity and complications of obesity have been observed, Abdelmalek said.
“There is an increasing amount of data that suggests high fructose corn syrup is fueling the fire of the obesity epidemic, but until now no one has ever suggested that it contributes to liver disease and/or liver injury.” Abdelmalek said the next step is more studies looking at the mechanisms of liver injury.
“We need to do formal studies that evaluate the influence of limiting or completely discontinuing high fructose corn syrup from one’s diet and see if there are health benefits from doing so,” she said.
Other authors on the study include Ayako Suzuki, Cynthia Guy, Anna Mae Diehl, all of Duke; Aynur Unalp-Arida and Ryan Colvin of John Hopkins; and Richard Johnson of the University of Colorado.
The stuff in soft drinks is HFCS-55, 55 percent fructose and 42 percent glucose. There's 31 percent more fructose than glucose. When fructose is metabolized it needs one less enzyme than glucose to make glycerol, which happens to make up the spine of triglycerides when glycerol combines with free fatty acids.
BTTT!
The scene from Monty Python's "Meaning of Life" immediately came to mind.
And you'll be d@mn glad to get it for the fiber content, right comrade?
"It's only 'wafer thin.'"
“correlated”
You’ll notice this word pop up a lot, and I might remind everyone that it’s a fairly well-established truth that correlation is not causation, though, obviously, that’s what they want you to think. Hence the sensationalistic headlines. If your study doesn’t produce sensationalistic headlines, the people who fund you might start asking, “What do we pay him for, anyway?”
Science is supposed to be all about creating theories that can be falsified by tests. But, obviously, the way they run these “studies,” they’re trying to confirm, not falsify. And surprise, surprise, when they come out with the results, they don’t allege that corn syrup causes liver damage. No, no. That would mean that their theory about the cause-and-effect relationship between corn syrup and bodily damage had been confirmed after withstanding falsification. But the tests aren’t about proving their theory wrong, as we’ve seen. It’s about finding “links” and bending over backwards not to come up with an alternative explanation.
I re-use the bottles for root beer for my grands...! My dad made it when I was a kid, and there is none better.
http://rootbeerextract.net/
“Our findings suggest that we may need to go back to healthier diets that are more holistic”
No need to listen to anyone who uses the word “holistic.” It’s a weasel word. He may actually be making a good point; something about consuming a variety of foods and not using the same-old ingredients in everything. But if he wants to say that, he should go ahead and say it. Invoking “holistic” cures is lazy and near-meaningless.
Because then we couldn't be taxing Americans $4 billion a year and handing it to the promoters of HFCS. Remember, even if it's bad for Americans' health, it's "good for America"...and lobbyists.
I have to travel out of my neighborhood to get a restaurant serving of meat with fat on it. I live in the health-nut section of New York. The people who want to live forever have forced them to trim off every microgram. I’m a grown-up, I tell the managers. I can cut off the fat I don’t want. They laugh but keep serving meat that is lean as a bean.
And do they have dsl where you are?
I limit what I can of HFCS, for both me and my daughter. I did buy a big jar of strawberry preserves, however, and naturally (or not), HFCS was the 2nd ingrdient. I don’t have it that often...but will be getting canning supplies and making my own preserves from here on in. Thanks government, yet again, for forcing another quasi-artifical ingredient into the food chain.
But the disaccharide, sucrose (cane sugar) is made of the two monosaccharides glucose and fructose, requiring an enzyme to break it into them. Why then would high fructose corn syrup be bad? What is it and how`s it constructed ( HFCS)? Could the fact that one is an aldose (glucose) and the other`s a ketose (fructose) be the key?
Whats the proportion of glucose to fructose in each?
Good product, apparently not available at this time.
They should just make it permanently available.
I’m not educated enough on the technicals to answer your question, but the video *does* address what you asked.
Per the lecturer/presenter in the linked video, the metabolism of glucose is completely and totally different than sucrose or fructose, and doesn’t create the issues that sucrose/fructose do. I’m afraid I must defer to suggesting you watch the video.
Forgot to say in my earlier reply to you that the video I linked kind of lays out this dual threat. The obesity > pre-diabetes thing from HFCS has been suggested for a while, but aligned with the article that started this thread, Dr. Lustig arrives at a very simlar conclusion, eg; that because the metabolic pathway for sucrose/fructose is so remarkably similar to that of ethyl alcohol, we should not be too surprised to see liver-toxic effects from HFCS, up to and including cirrhosis.
Again, it’s whether you believe all this or not. I’m not technically educated enough to properly evaluate his conclusions.
I don’t know anything about the differences. And I don’t know anything about how these differences do or don’t effect the liver or weight gain.
but I can tell you without a doubt 100% certain, that HFCS aggravates my heartburn about 500 times worse than ordinary table sugar. I have a very sensitive stomach and I am prone to severe heartburn...so bad the pain will sometimes make me throw up. if I watch what I eat, I can keep it at bay without pills. I do not eat sugar of any kind or even diet pop. very little tea or coffee also.
But when I was testing everything...eliminating this and that, then trying to add back this then that...I figured out that HFSC is like gasoline(burning gasoline that is on fire) in my stomach. Almost immediately after eating it in fact.
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