no suprises here really!:
Fructose rapidly
caused liver damage even without weight gain. The researchers found that over
the six-week study period liver damage more than doubled in the animals fed a
high-fructose diet as compared to those in the control group.
Kavanagh's team
studied monkeys who were allowed to eat as much as they wanted of low-fat food
with added fructose for seven years, as compared to a control group fed a
low-fructose, low-fat diet for the same time period. Not surprisingly, the
animals allowed to eat as much as they wanted of the high-fructose diet gained
50 percent more weight than the control group. They developed diabetes at three
times the rate of the control group and also developed hepatic steatosis, or
non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Ten middle-aged, normal weight
monkeys who had never eaten fructose were divided into two groups based on
comparable body shapes and waist circumference [surely 10 is too small a number
to draw great conclusions from though!].
Over six weeks, one group was fed a calorie-controlled diet consisting of 24
percent fructose, while the control group was fed a calorie-controlled diet
with only a negligible amount of fructose, approximately 0.5 percent.
Both diets had the same amount of
fat, carbohydrate and protein, but the sources were different, Kavanagh said.
The high-fructose group's diet was made from flour, butter, pork fat, eggs and
fructose (the main ingredient in corn syrup), similar to what many people eat,
while the control group's diet was made from healthy complex carbohydrates and
soy protein. [which if
you ask me adds way to many confounding variables to the study to conclude
much!!]
In the high-fructose group, the
researchers found that the type of intestinal bacteria hadn't changed, but that
they were migrating to the liver more rapidly and causing damage there. It
appears that something about the high fructose levels was causing the
intestines to be less protective than normal, and consequently allowing the
bacteria to leak out at a 30 percent higher rate, Kavanagh said.
One of the limitations of the
study was that it only tested for fructose and not dextrose. Fructose and
dextrose are simple sugars found naturally in plants.
"We studied fructose because
it is the most commonly added sugar in the American diet, but based on our
study findings, we can't say conclusively that fructose caused the liver
damage," Kavanagh said. "What we can say is that high added sugars
caused bacteria to exit the intestines, go into the blood stream and damage the
liver.
"The liver damage began even
in the absence of weight gain. This could have clinical implications because
most doctors and scientists have thought that it was the fat in and around
tissues in the body that caused the health problems."
