The difference between fructose and glucose: it’s not all in your mind
Many food activists and public health researchers are ready to pin a substantial portion of blame for the nation’s obesity epidemic on the skyrocketing consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, widely used to sweeten processed foods and beverages in the U.S. since the 1980s. But food and beverage makers are fighting back.
Glucose and fructose are both simple sugars—and equal parts of each is the recipe for table sugar. (High-fructose corn syrup is a bit more intensely sweet because it’s made up of 55% fructose.) But scientists have long suspected there are differences in the way the human body processes these two forms of carbohydrate. But much of that research has been conducted on animals, leading many to question whether the human body makes any distinction between glucose and fructose.
More research on humans would help. And while a study published online in the March issue of the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism raises more questions than it answers, it’s a start.
Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University scanned the brains of nine healthy, normal-weight subjects in the minutes after each got an infusion of equal volumes of glucose, of fructose and of saline. The brain scans aimed to capture activity in a relatively small swath of the human brain in and around the hypothalamus, which plays a key but complex role in setting appetite levels and directing production of metabolic hormones.
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The researchers, led by Dr. John Purnell, found that “cortical control areas”—broad swaths of gray matter that surrounded the hypothalamus — responded quite differently to the infusion of fructose than they did to glucose.