Is fructose bad for you?

Rhona asks…

“I keep hearing lately that fructose is harmful and should be avoided. Does that mean that fruit is bad for you!!?”

There’s no need to worry about fruit at all.

The problem is fructose in unnatural form, such as in coke. A 16 fl oz bottle of coke has roughly the same amount of fructose (29 g) as all my meals and snacks with a lot of fruit and veg.

The problem is that overweight people tend to have full glycogen stores and the liver’s primary way of disposing of fructose is to convert it to glycogen. So when fructose is ingested from coke (for example), you have a quadruple whammy — no primary disposal path, no fiber to slow down digestion, unnatural amounts in one go and no natural packaging that provides other vitamins/minerals. 

You can imagine what happens in people who overeat and drink coke all day, for example — it’s a mammoth disaster biochemically. Once again, we see that if you go against nature, bad things happen.

Also, since we’ve been lied to for decades about saturated fat causing heart disease, food manufacturers, restaurants and fast food places have switched to cheap oil high in polyunsaturated fats (omega-6). Fructose in combination with polyunsaturated fats causes liver damage, so coke and fries = very bad for the liver as well as creating chronic inflammation, the root cause of all chronic diseases.

So there’s no need to worry about fruit — it’s a desirable part of human nutrition. The most important thing you can do is to get your whole diet natural and balanced, so you’re getting all the vitamins and minerals you need, and automatically avoid the harmful stuff.

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Michael Kinnaird is the author of Happy Guide, the result of a 20 year exploration into what works for health and happiness.

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