First they came for my potatoes…

While researching some stuff for the Carbohydrate wars I kept stumbling across references to fructose. So I picked up Dr. Johnson’s book, ‘The Sugar Fix.’ Bottom line, fruit is bad for me too.

Oh well.

It doesn’t mean no fruit of course. And it isn’t even fruit that is the source of way too much of our fructose. No, it’s corn. It seems that we’ve discovered how to create fructose, a specific kind of sugar, out of corn. Called High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS, it’s pretty much in everything these days.

His audience is mostly people trying to loose weight by dieting. He does, however, have a number of tidbits for diabetics. Among those are his lab rat studies in which he induced glucose intolerance by putting the little boogers on a high fructose diet while his control group was actually on plain sugar. His theory, in a nutshell, is that as we’ve added fructose to most everything over the last thirty years we’ve got over selves overloading on a food that used to be available only in moderation.

He goes on to explain the important of ‘Uric Acid’ as a mechanism, and provides advice on reducing intake.

The one piece of good news is that I’ve already dropped soda, and that seems to be the biggest single source. I will miss Gatorade through, since that was a common fruit drink for me.

To bottom line it, he doesn’t claim it causes a BG spike. In fact, fruit is highly recommended, in moderation, for diabetics following the Low-GI method. No, his research tends to point to fructose increasing insulin resistance in type 2’s. Type one’s probably don’t have that much fruit in their diet anymore anyway since they are so high in carbohydrates.