> People enzymatically convert corn sugar to match what comes out of sugar cane. Straight-up corn sugar is harmless, "high-fructose" is deadly.
Corn sugar is the monosaccharide glucose (more specifically its a specific stereoisomer of glucose called dextrose or D-glucose).[1] Cane sugar is sucrose, which is a disaccharide of composed of glucose and fructose.[2]
There is no way to enzymatically convert a monosaccharide to a disaccharide, you would need to be joining the glucose together with a fructose, which, as we are not fruit don't just have naturally occurring in our body.
When you eat sucrose, the enzyme sucrase-isomaltase located in the small intestine catalyzes its hydrolysis into fructose and glucose.[3,4] High-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of glucose and fructose which is exactly what you get when your body enzymatically breaks down sucrose.[5]
So corn sugar is glucose. Sugar can is sucrose. And high-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of "pre-digested" sucrose. I think that high-fructose corn syrup is probably bad in that its in everything and cheap, but I can't see how its any worse than regular sugar. And corn sugar is not the same as regular sugar, it lacks fructose entirely.
Yet, millions of tons of corn sugar is, in fact, made via industrial enzymatic process into "high-fructose corn sugar", mainly because it is sweeter when cold than straight glucose, and doesn't absorb water from air as readily. Cane sugar in beverages has typically already separated into glucose and fructose, no sucrase needed.
Fructose is a problem because it is processed as a toxin, in the liver. Fructose was invented by flowering plants in the early Cretaceous because, erg for erg, it tasted sweeter to insects. Our evolutionary ancestors never had need to evolve means to process much of it. The liver makes it into fat, wraps it in cholesterol, and ships it off to the fat cells to store, emitting lots of uric acid as waste. Too much uric acid causes lots of problems.
If production of cholesterol is inadequate, worse things happen.
Fructose is a minor problem if consumed along with enough fiber, because enough fiber delays absorption long enough for your intestinal bacteria to get a crack at it first. (They can eat fructose all day long.) But modern industrial "food" processing is all about eliminating fiber, and delivering the straight-up stuff. The only actual fruit without enough fiber is, oddly, grapes.
hollerith 631 days ago [-]
> Our evolutionary ancestors never had need to evolve means to process much of it.
That's not true because about half of the carbs in fruits and vegetables is fructose. (Cherries have the lowest ratio I know about at about 30%; apples and pears have the highest at around 70%; most fruits and vegetable are almost exactly half fructose and half glucose.)
Also, if you eat a spaghetti meal or a lot of potatoes (which rapidly become glucose and get absorbed) your body will convert a decent amount of the glucose into fructose according to researcher Robert Lustig MD.
(I don't disagree with your overall point that most affluent people consume too much fructose. In the ancestral environment however calories were scarce enough that people should have and did eat almost all the fructose they could find.)
loeg 631 days ago [-]
Worth keeping in mind that Lustig is a crank who says a lot of things that are beyond what is supported by the science and most likely untrue. I don't know if that particular statement is true or not, but I am less likely to believe it with Lustig's name attached than without it.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
Prehistorically, fructose without intermixed fiber was found mainly in honeycombs, i.e. rarely. Beverages are the way most people get the most concentrated blasts of fructose nowadays. With enough fiber, intestinal bacteria get first crack at it. (Keep your intestinal bacteria well-fed; hungry bacteria will eat you instead.)
Your body has processes to produce fructose, which is then processed by the liver to fat for storage, when preparing for lean times seems indicated.
It is hard to research, but it seems like mangoes have the highest proportion of fructose. Honey has more fructose than glucose, and agave syrup is mostly fructose.
tptacek 631 days ago [-]
Again, worth pointing out that none of this fructose stuff is really operable, because there isn't a mainstream "low-fructose" sugar that anyone uses as a sweetener†. As you acknowledged across the thread: HFCS is (if not chemically identical) bioavailably the same thing as cane sugar.
† Other sugars get used for functional reasons other than sweetening, of course.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
You can buy straight glucose, sold as "corn sugar", from brewery suppliers. In the US they would like to sell you a 50-pound bag for $100, but a 10-pound bag for $20 should last you a long time. It all comes, ultimately, from Tate and Lyle. It may also be labeled "dextrose"; same stuff. They will let you pay as much as you like. (Some claim to offer "organic", but there is really no way to tell and, by the evidence, they are probably just re-bagging it with a new label, and lying. Enforcement is nonexistent.)
There are other sugars, maltose, maltodextrin, [not lactose] with varying numbers of glucose molecules stitched end on end, collectively amyloses. With enough, it becomes starch.
There is also left-handed enantiomeric glucose, zero calories, expensive, and racemic glucose, 50% calories. The latter is made from raw chemicals. Guessing they make the former by feeding the latter to bugs and selling what is left over, although there are crystallization tricks.
I bake with corn sugar, and it works fine. I have found that hot chocolate made with it is unsatisfying without a half-teaspoon of table sugar added. Or a marshmallow.
hollerith 631 days ago [-]
>lactose, etc. Those are just varying numbers of glucose molecules stitched end on end.
Not so: lactose is a glucose stitched to a galactose molecule.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
I am corrected. Chemistry offers a limitless supply of complications.
tptacek 631 days ago [-]
The health benefits of table sugar over HFCS are a myth. High-fructose corn syrup is higher in fructose relative to normal corn syrup, not to sugar. The HFCS used in processed foods has the same percentage of fructose as table sugar; your body does not see a meaningful difference between the two. The whole HFCS thing is Mercola science.
Sugar is certainly not good for you. The problem with HFCS is that it makes it cheap easy for the food industry to create hyperpalatable foods jacked with sugar. But choosing foods with "cane sugar" does nothing to improve health outcomes.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
"Table sugar" and HFCS are, chemically, the same thing.
HFCS has the commercial benefit of being substantially cheaper than cane sugar, in part via massive subsidy by the US federal government, and in part because maize is so fantastically productive of starch cheap to convert to glucose and thence via chemical-engineered wizardry to fructose.
HFCS originated as a clever way to consume the massive influx of surplus maize produced by the Nixon adminstration's agricultural subsidies for mono-crop maize production instituted under Earl Butz, still in place. The public health catastrophe we still suffer is just an unfortunate side effect of the disproportionately representated rural voting bloc that keeps the subsidies in place.
dilap 631 days ago [-]
> "Table sugar" and HFCS are, chemically, the same thing.
Dicarbonyls are blamed for "obliterative bronchiolitic lung disease", which sounds unpleasant.
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 631 days ago [-]
Ah, Earl Butz. The man was quite the comedian.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
Him and Ed Meese.
rabbits_2002 631 days ago [-]
isnt there a difference in glycemic index between the two?
nsxwolf 631 days ago [-]
Tobacco and sugar cane don't belong in the same list. It's like dismissing the Boeing door-flying-off incident by saying "Don't pay it any mind, motorcycles are far more dangerous overall"
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
Tobacco and sugar vendors are quick to endorse this sentiment.
postalrat 631 days ago [-]
Attempts to frighten people with bullshit rarely work for long then backfire.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
And then they die, in droves, but neatly out of sight. "Nothing to see here, just millions dying from lung and throat cancer, and from complications from fatty-liver disease." (Vs. barely a couple hundred lately via Boeing, conveniently overseas. Between flying 737-Max and tobacco, I would recommend the former.)
sneak 631 days ago [-]
Tobacco kills 7x as many in the US as the “opiate crisis” every day, week, month, and year. He’s got an important point.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
And sugar way more than tobacco.
postalrat 631 days ago [-]
Protein and fat kills just as many.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
No. Fat, in particular, has been blamed for the illnesses caused in fact by sugar and by hydrogenated oils (called "trans fat" on US food labels). Most people still believe that saturated fat is the cause of those illnesses, and still prefer "low-fat" food laced, instead, with sugar.
Technically, trans fats were supposed to be banned in US food, but major corporations get from the FDA a "temporary exception", year after year, to put it in anyway, with no requirement to reveal it as "trans fat" on the label. It has been well-known as a major cause of heart disease since the '70s, but took until late in the last decade to get (technically) banned.
varelse 631 days ago [-]
[dead]
mtlmtlmtlmtl 631 days ago [-]
Tobacco very rarely kills due to acute toxicity though. I mean, technically nicotine is a very potent and lethal toxin, but it's also so quickly absorbed and so nauseating that you have to go out of your way to extract the nicotine and take it through means that don't allow purging it from your body to even have a chance at reaching those toxicity levels.
In other words, hemlock and tobacco are toxic in very different ways and it's a bit strange to say one is more toxic than the other at all. Accidental tobacco poisoning is hardly a thing at all.
elsonrodriguez 631 days ago [-]
On the subject of smell, there are some people that can distinguish wild carrot from poison hemlock by smell alone.
In a controlled educational setting a sample of both was pass around a crowd of about 25 people at different times, and the instructor asked if anybody detected a strong smell in either sample.
I found the smell of poison hemlock terrible, a kind of chemical souring sensation in the back of the nose, as did one or two others in the group.
The instructor highlighted that the ratio of people sensitive was typically the same in every group, then moved on to another topic.
This might be true for water hemlock as well, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.
I still identify wild carrot visually, but always do a sniff test as a final check.
ekimehtor 631 days ago [-]
I agree that giant hogweed is worse, maybe not as deadly but capable of blinding just from touching it's roots and rubbing your eyes. I was unfortunately enough to encounter hogweed while prospecting for gold, I was digging into the bank of a stream with a hand shovel . I ended up burn like blisters arthritis like pain for over two years. Nasty nasty stuff!
janalsncm 631 days ago [-]
There’s no first principles reason tobacco is a legal product. If it was invented today, as a product which kills or disables a large percentage of its users, it would be banned.
Jhsto 631 days ago [-]
Only the combustion of the plant is the problem though - not the addictive parts of it: artificially created nicotine enjoys an open market globally. Tobacco is in a sense demonized due to the direct idea that it’s combusted — nicotine pouches are legal everywhere in the EU but the ones with tobacco are banned sans Sweden.
Nicotine pouches were first sold in year 2008 according to Wikipedia.
angiosperm 631 days ago [-]
Tobacco is anyway in decline after it was demonstrated to kill people not directly using it. There have been efforts at limiting alcohol, some catastrophic. Practically nothing has been done yet about concentrated sugar.
bglazer 631 days ago [-]
It’s worth noting that tobacco consumption has decreased in many places, especially high income countries, but it’s increasing in many countries
Corn sugar is the monosaccharide glucose (more specifically its a specific stereoisomer of glucose called dextrose or D-glucose).[1] Cane sugar is sucrose, which is a disaccharide of composed of glucose and fructose.[2]
There is no way to enzymatically convert a monosaccharide to a disaccharide, you would need to be joining the glucose together with a fructose, which, as we are not fruit don't just have naturally occurring in our body.
When you eat sucrose, the enzyme sucrase-isomaltase located in the small intestine catalyzes its hydrolysis into fructose and glucose.[3,4] High-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of glucose and fructose which is exactly what you get when your body enzymatically breaks down sucrose.[5]
So corn sugar is glucose. Sugar can is sucrose. And high-fructose corn syrup is a mixture of "pre-digested" sucrose. I think that high-fructose corn syrup is probably bad in that its in everything and cheap, but I can't see how its any worse than regular sugar. And corn sugar is not the same as regular sugar, it lacks fructose entirely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_sugar
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrase
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrase-isomaltase
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
Fructose is a problem because it is processed as a toxin, in the liver. Fructose was invented by flowering plants in the early Cretaceous because, erg for erg, it tasted sweeter to insects. Our evolutionary ancestors never had need to evolve means to process much of it. The liver makes it into fat, wraps it in cholesterol, and ships it off to the fat cells to store, emitting lots of uric acid as waste. Too much uric acid causes lots of problems.
If production of cholesterol is inadequate, worse things happen.
Fructose is a minor problem if consumed along with enough fiber, because enough fiber delays absorption long enough for your intestinal bacteria to get a crack at it first. (They can eat fructose all day long.) But modern industrial "food" processing is all about eliminating fiber, and delivering the straight-up stuff. The only actual fruit without enough fiber is, oddly, grapes.
That's not true because about half of the carbs in fruits and vegetables is fructose. (Cherries have the lowest ratio I know about at about 30%; apples and pears have the highest at around 70%; most fruits and vegetable are almost exactly half fructose and half glucose.)
Also, if you eat a spaghetti meal or a lot of potatoes (which rapidly become glucose and get absorbed) your body will convert a decent amount of the glucose into fructose according to researcher Robert Lustig MD.
(I don't disagree with your overall point that most affluent people consume too much fructose. In the ancestral environment however calories were scarce enough that people should have and did eat almost all the fructose they could find.)
Your body has processes to produce fructose, which is then processed by the liver to fat for storage, when preparing for lean times seems indicated.
It is hard to research, but it seems like mangoes have the highest proportion of fructose. Honey has more fructose than glucose, and agave syrup is mostly fructose.
† Other sugars get used for functional reasons other than sweetening, of course.
There are other sugars, maltose, maltodextrin, [not lactose] with varying numbers of glucose molecules stitched end on end, collectively amyloses. With enough, it becomes starch.
There is also left-handed enantiomeric glucose, zero calories, expensive, and racemic glucose, 50% calories. The latter is made from raw chemicals. Guessing they make the former by feeding the latter to bugs and selling what is left over, although there are crystallization tricks.
I bake with corn sugar, and it works fine. I have found that hot chocolate made with it is unsatisfying without a half-teaspoon of table sugar added. Or a marshmallow.
Not so: lactose is a glucose stitched to a galactose molecule.
Sugar is certainly not good for you. The problem with HFCS is that it makes it cheap easy for the food industry to create hyperpalatable foods jacked with sugar. But choosing foods with "cane sugar" does nothing to improve health outcomes.
HFCS has the commercial benefit of being substantially cheaper than cane sugar, in part via massive subsidy by the US federal government, and in part because maize is so fantastically productive of starch cheap to convert to glucose and thence via chemical-engineered wizardry to fructose.
HFCS originated as a clever way to consume the massive influx of surplus maize produced by the Nixon adminstration's agricultural subsidies for mono-crop maize production instituted under Earl Butz, still in place. The public health catastrophe we still suffer is just an unfortunate side effect of the disproportionately representated rural voting bloc that keeps the subsidies in place.
in theory, but in practice there can be impurities from the production process, e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-012-5817-x
Dicarbonyls are blamed for "obliterative bronchiolitic lung disease", which sounds unpleasant.
Technically, trans fats were supposed to be banned in US food, but major corporations get from the FDA a "temporary exception", year after year, to put it in anyway, with no requirement to reveal it as "trans fat" on the label. It has been well-known as a major cause of heart disease since the '70s, but took until late in the last decade to get (technically) banned.
In other words, hemlock and tobacco are toxic in very different ways and it's a bit strange to say one is more toxic than the other at all. Accidental tobacco poisoning is hardly a thing at all.
In a controlled educational setting a sample of both was pass around a crowd of about 25 people at different times, and the instructor asked if anybody detected a strong smell in either sample.
I found the smell of poison hemlock terrible, a kind of chemical souring sensation in the back of the nose, as did one or two others in the group.
The instructor highlighted that the ratio of people sensitive was typically the same in every group, then moved on to another topic.
This might be true for water hemlock as well, but I'm not going out of my way to find out.
I still identify wild carrot visually, but always do a sniff test as a final check.
Nicotine pouches were first sold in year 2008 according to Wikipedia.