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CREDIT: Artem Chernyshevych | Stock Xchng |
Foods
that contain the sugar fructose may cause people to gain more weight than foods
that contain the sugar glucose, a new study suggests. Consuming glucose signals
to the brain that you've eaten, and thus satiates appetite. By contrast, eating
fructose does not, said the researchers, from Yale University School of
Medicine. The results suggest that the pervasiveness of high-fructose corn
syrup in Western diets — the sugar is found in many processed foods and beverages,
including juice and soda — may contribute to the obesity epidemic, experts say.
But
other experts argue that the findings should be interpreted with caution. The
study examined the brain's response to pure fructose and pure glucose. However,
processed foods generally contain a combination of fructose and glucose
(high-fructose corn syrup, for example, contains about 55 percent fructose and
45 percent glucose.) For this reason, it's not possible to say how the results
would play out in the real world, said Terry Davidson, director of the Center
for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D.C. "I'm
not necessarily sure that you would have seen similar effects," if the
study included high-fructose corn syrup instead of pure fructose, Davidson
said.
In
addition, the study only looked at the sugars' effects on the brain, and did
not examine whether people really do eat more food after consuming fructose
than they would after eating glucose. So more research is needed to better
understand the role fructose plays in obesity, Dr. Jonathan Purnell, a
professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, wrote in an
editorial accompanying the study. The study involved 20 normal-weight people
who had their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
before and after they drank water sweetened with either fructose or glucose. When
people consumed glucose, the researchers saw a decrease in activity in the
hypothalamus, a brain region that regulates appetite and rewards. However, they
did not see this decrease after fructose consumption. The study and editorial
were published Jan. 1 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Source: Live Science
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