Fruit juice is commonly seen in the diets of people who are trying to reduce weight as a healthier substitute for soft drinks and other "bad drinks." As such, new research reveals that fruit juice could contain a common sugar that has negative effects on one's body.
Fruit Juice Sugar
Fruit juice, like many drinks, is made up of a lot of components one of which includes a common sugar that could be behind the widely felt obesity epidemic. Ingestion of the common sugar has resulted in a metabolic switch in one's body being flicked.
This results in increased hunger, thirst, and fat accumulation and even more pressing results like insulin resistance, increased blood pressure, and systemic inflammation. One common compound found in fruits and honey is fructose, which takes up a small fraction of modern Western diets' overall fructose intake.
Fructose, or monosaccharide, has four calories per gram; and its metabolism doesn't need insulin while also having minimal impact on blood glucose levels. This sugar is often found in highly concentrated fruit juices.
Richard Johnson, a University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus professor of medicine, said that most fructose that people take comes from high-fructose corn syrup and table sugar. He said that soft drinks, for example, could have 30 grams of fructose while a kiwi would only have 2 to 3 grams.
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Effect of Fructose
A study in the Cell Metabolism journal highlighted how low fructose levels in fruits are mostly negated by the small intestine. It also highlights how high-dose fructose results in the clearance capacity of the intestinal fructose being saturated.
Also, ingesting too much fructose would result in an excess spilling onto a person's colonic microbiota and liver. Johnson highlighted how eating moderate fructose levels from fruit results in the body deactivating the fructose.
Upon deactivation, the body won't get enough sugar and the effects of fructose can be countered by other natural things in fruits like vitamin C, potassium, and fiber. The problem happens when people consume high fructose volumes in a single sitting, like eating 100 fruits at a time.
Low Levels of ATP
If people drink fruit juice, they're able to get multiple concentrated fructose from five or six fruits in a single glass. Because of less fiber in fruit juices, its sugars are more easily absorbed into a person's blood, resulting in larger fructose quantities being absorbed in a shorter amount of time.
There are a lot of fruit juices that have added sugars, which result in even higher fructose concentrate levels, with some fruit juices having more sugars compared to a single can of Coke and other soft drinks. Fructose can also become a powerful biological switch that activates multiple things like hunger, eating, and even leptin resistance.
The body then responds by feeling more hungry or thirsty, while its satiety and fullness are being blocked. The body's main energy currency ATP is then lowered, which is actually a characteristic of diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.
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