Fructose Essay

484 Words2 Pages
Fruits and vegetables have lesser amounts of fructose that most bodies can handle well. With added sugars in the modern diet, it brings about more harmful effects to the body. It is also known as the fruit sugar and it is a monosaccharide. Fructose is very similar to glucose. Fructose is the sweetest of all nutritive sweeteners. It has roughly 1.2 to 1.8 times the sweetness of sucrose. Fructose does not hydrolyze in acidic conditions like sucrose does; so finished product sweetness and flavor are stable over extended storage times. Fructose has several roles in the body. Fruits and vegetables have relatively small, "normal" amounts of fructose that most bodies can handle quite well. The problem comes with added sugars in the modern diet, the volume of which has grown rapidly in recent decades. The blame has often been pinned to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which manufacturers say is made up of 55% fructose and 45% glucose. In truth, the exact proportions have been revealed in testing to be somewhat variable. For example, this study revealed an average of 59% fructose in HFCS, with some major brands of soda containing 65% fructose. Still, sucrose (granulated sugar) is half fructose and half glucose. So HFCS supposedly doesn't have a whole lot more fructose than "regular" sugar, gram for gram. High fructose corn syrup has become incredibly inexpensive and abundant, partially due to corn subsidies in the United States. So many argue that the problem is that it has become so cheap that it has crept its way into a great number of the foods we eat every day. Is corn syrup fructose different than fructose found in other foods? No, all fructose works the same in the body, whether it comes from corn syrup, cane sugar, beet sugar, strawberries, honey, or tomatoes. Only the amounts are different. For example, a cup of chopped tomatoes has 2.5 grams of

More about Fructose Essay

Open Document