Hey Adam, as someone who is currently in higher education, thank you for helping teach me how to read and understand research studies better. It has helped a lot with essays and research papers that require going through dozens of studies and figuring out which ones are more valuable than others.
@@mimosveta you need some lessons at reading yourself because OP said nothing about the actual contents. Adam is not a biochemist so inaccuracies are to be expected
Also, it seems like the obvious underlying variable in the added sugar study was lifestyle outside of eating. People who eat more whole, unprocessed foods also tend to have a larger health focus that includes exercise and general healthy living techniques. I'd love to see a meta-analysis that controlled for weekly exercise, sleep habits, etc.
I think the point here is that people are being forced to eat highly processed sugars and hydrogenated/vegetable/seed oils in order to subsidize the American corn/cotton industries and the government really doesn't give a shit about it's populace's health. Heck, most of these oils were only considered fit for industrial usage until companies realized you chemically alter it so that it didn't stink... There is a reason why health conscious people steer clear of highly processed sugars and oils (sometimes eliminating it from their diet completely if they can afford it) and that's because it's an addictive poison that's pumped into everything and the temptation to indulge and keep indulging is programmed into 21st century children from birth (think corporate propaganda getting kids to recognize their slop mascot).
@@pikapi6993 I come from rice eating culture. The starches function like sugar. People are clueless regarding Asians every time they say they are still thin when their liver is fattening up and Medicare has a lower BMI threshold for them to qualify for diabetes screening. Naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy.
The problem is that many processed foods use apple juice concentrate (or some other fruit juice) as a loophole to prevent their sugars from getting classified as 'added sugars', despite apple juice concentrate being pure sugar water and having basically no fiber or micronutrients.
@@legoworks-cg5hk I think that's why the term "added sugar" came to be. It doesn't matter where it came from, if it is in concentrated/extracted form, it has risk associated
I really don't understand how concentrated fruity juice is not considered added sugar 😑 even when I make a natural orange juice for myself, I count it as added sugar for the day
Whats even worse? Fructose seems to be the worst sugar of them all. Not only will it be metabolized to glucose - no in the process it damages your liver. Because in contrast to other sugars it can only be processed in your liver and not in your whole body.
@@auricia201 added sugar was a compromise that the government made with farmers so that their produce would be seen as healthier than something with comparable sugars
Hey Adam! Thanks for today's video. Because you mentioned the recent study regarding Erythritol at the end, I think there's something important to keep in mind about it for you to take a gander at in preparation for the next episode if you get the chance. Erythritol is a naturally occurring substance in the human body, which gets produced around the time of cardiovascular events as it turns out. That study on the effects of erythritol, as far as I understand it, did not control for naturally occurrences of Erythritol versus added erythritol to food. Which could be especially problematic when drawing conclusions about it's alleged link to cardiovascular events. Looking forward to the next ep!
saw a comment on a short by dr karan i think is the channel that summed it up well, “it’s easier to clickbait than to prove causality” or something to that effect, it could eventually be a test for cardiovascular health, tell a patient to not eat any erythritol for a few days to a week, see their level, and get an idea of their risk. and most likely i think the food industry will switch to another sugar alcohol if only for positive press
Since I have heart problems in family history, I have decided to limit the intake of erythritol in my diet. I can't test myself for its production in the case of a cardiovascular event, but I don't want to add to the possible problem. It would be ironic if the body actually makes erythritol as a protection reaction to the event, similar to the increased production of white blood cells in response to an infection. Scientific conclusions can be skewed in the favor of certain expectations.
One of the "gotchas" of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that there are many common formulations, and the formulation does not need to be listed on the ingredients label. For instance, coke and sprite use HFCS55 which is 55% fructose and 45% glucose which could lead to the malabsorption of the fructose, but many/most fruit juices use HFCS42 which is 42% fructose and 58% glucose so we would expect even more efficient absorption of the fructose than with sucrose (50/50 glucose/fructose). Both products would just list "High Fructose Corn Syrup" on their label.
I started watching what I eat about 8 months ago, around when you posted the episode about seed oils. I haven’t cut out sugar entirely, but I’ve changed all of my soda drinks to diet soda, which has helped me maintain a calorie deficit alongside more frequent exercise. Since then I’ve dropped 35 lbs, I look a lot better, and I feel a lot better in my own skin, which is something I think you’ve talked about at some point
As I understand it, diet drinks are just diabetes waiting to happen. You tell your body and prime it for sweet things that never come, so the undigestible sweet chemicals mess up the natural cycle, increasing your chance of issues.
Gecko: You're kidding, right? Diet soda is worse than regular soda. BOTH are terrible for your body. See: The Dark Side of Diet Soda That Nobody Talks About
-us to -i is how you pluralize some words with Latin roots, like cactus/cacti. Words with Greek roots, however, are different. For example, octopus has Greek roots, so the plural isn't octopi, it'd actually be octopodes - but, honestly, the correct answer is probably just octopuses. Octopi would be considered a hypercorrection, by the way. Anyways, glucose has Greek roots (comes from γλεῦκος/gleukos). Greek words that end in -os/-ος become plural by changing -os/-ος to -ee/οι. So, the plural of γλεῦκος/gleukos would be γλεῦκοι/gleukee. Bringing that to English, I'd guess the correct plural of glucose would be something like glucee. *Edit:* Y'know, while researching this comment, I ran into the corrections that the people replying to me have said. They're right, my information is incomplete (and likely wrong in some parts), but thanks to Cunningham's Law, I've now learned *why* I was wrong, so that's neat!
following the octopusses rule (considering we don't use greek plurals, ever) it would be glucoses. I personally would just say glucose molecules or sorts of glucose
Glucose has Greek roots, as you said, but it is one of these linguistic exceptions. The -ose is from the glucose and not a result of the anglicization of the Greek "gleukos" as the "gluco" comes from the Greek "glukus" and the -ose is etymologically from glucose (ie "dextrose" would be from the Greek "dexter" and "-ose" from glucose). So the plural of glucose would follow regular English rules to glucoses
@@PinHeadSupliciumwtf that feels right when I say it out loud so I like your answer best. Whatever is best understood and easiest to say morphologically with my face.
Just gonna comment this after looking at newest first on some of your non traditional recipes. There are SOOO many haters who don’t use constructive criticism and just discard a recipe because it’s not what they do, which annoys me to no end. Please keep going with your cooking videos and don’t listen to people like them.
I was born in the mid 80's and grew up staying away from fat and salt but loving sugar. From that i prefer to snack on candy over salty snacks. Now my doctor says I have to cut the sugar out of my diet and it feels like my happiness has been taken from me.
Thanks for another great podcast Adam. FYI from a biochemist’s standpoint, we would say “glucose molecules” or “molecules of glucose”, rather than pluralizing the chemical name. In that way, it’s similar to saying “loaves of bread” rather than something like “breads”. We pluralize the units, not the substance.
One more chemistry lesson: Freezing point depression is one of a series of properties known as “colligative properties of solutions”, which depends on the number or concentration of particles in a solution, but not on what those particles are. Since fructose and glucose have the same molecular weight and both dissolve into water as one particle per molecule, a certain mass (or weight) of glucose would have the same effect on freezing point depression as the same mass of fructose. However, disaccharides (like sucrose) have a higher molecular weight, but still dissolve in water as only one particle per molecule, so a certain mass of sucrose would not lower the freezing point as much as the same mass of glucose or fructose. By the way, table salt (sodium chloride) has a much lower formula weight than any sugar molecules, and it dissociates into two particles per formula unit when dissolved in water (sodium and chloride ions). This makes sodium chloride a highly effective substance for lowering the freezing point of water, which (combined with its low cost and relative environmental safety) is why it is the primary component in chemical mixtures used to melt ice on roadways.
I am one of those listening for the first time (you're welcome). I can't belive the video was almost an hour long, it went by like 15min. I subbed probably around halfway, you are a great communicator.
Another great listen, Adam! Thank you for digging into fine details on the things you discuss, it makes any topic youve covered infinitely more listenable. Keep it up!
I remember years ago watching a talk by Robert Lustig (pediatric endocrinologist) about the dangers of refined sugars. It’s a fascinating but confusing topic. I appreciate Adam’s deep dive on sugar.
Dr. Lustig once said "when God made the apple, he packaged the poison with the antidote". That would be, fiber. Fructose is looking like the most problematic sugar for people, but it's a "dose dependent" poison. In natural sources, it would rarely be an issue.
I've loosely followed Weight Watchers for years now. I think it's much more useful as a "healthy eating lifestyle" than a "diet", but I also believe that's how we should eat. Count me a believer in their plans.
7:42 i think what you're looking to say is "glucose monomer", monomer as in a single unit (mono) as opposed to a polymer of many of them stuck together
vinegar is considered a 'sugar' in the sense that it has calories and it is mandatory to put these calories in food labels. If they have calories, where do they fit in our 4 macronutrient model? Carbs!
A comment on acids: All acids are Lewis acids or bases i.e. they either accept (acid) or donate (base) electrons . When a hydrogen is lost or gained during the electron transfer, the molecules can be called Bronsted-Lowry acids (give up a hydrogen) or base (accept a hydrogen). The third type is Arrhenius acids and bases, which are simply the Bronsted-Lowry process done in water wherein the hydrogen leaves as a hydronium ion (in the case of acids), or when the hydrogen is accepted it leaves behind a hydroxyl ion (in the case of bases). So Arrhenius acids are a sub-set of Bronsted-Lowry acids, which are a sub-set of Lewis acids. Love your content Adam! I especially love the deep dive into a topic during the Monday podcasts. Vinegar Chicken on the Right.
As a father of type 1 diabetic I can strongly relate to "It's not sugars but other things it is wrapped in". However I would like to sterss that the way it's wrapped is also important. One big apple has a same amount of sugar as medium banana, but doesn't spike blood glucose as fast and as high as banana. But the moment you pass it through a blender and drink - oh boy, it spikes fast. Baking it also "unwraps" it and makes it faster to digest - BG spikes faster, and as I understand more sugar gets absorbed into blood rather than passing to the large intestine for all the flora. There's generally accepted rule of thumb in diabetic community to "never drink your carbs" because of these effects (obviously with the exception for emergency carton of juice that insulin-dependent folks keep at hand in case of hypoglycemia)
I made a STEVIA sweetened apple pie the other week. Turned out just like I wanted! No other sugars or sweetners other then the apples and the tiny amount of powdered stevia concentrate. Made it up on the go because I really really wanted pie but not overdo sugar or search for recipes (other then check that pure stevia don't burn to crap, it's fine) and let just do this! It was some fairly sweet red-yellow apples I had at home, not sure what kind. Mixed a few mini scoops of Stevia with a bit of corn starch, cinnamon, cardamon, pinch of salt and coated the cut up apples. Added a splash of water. Only buttered the bottom of the pan and made top crumble crust by chopping wheat flour and one mini scoop of stevia together with a stick of butter, a bit of oatmeal and another small pinch of salt and cardamom and covered the improvised apple filling. Into the oven until it got a pleasing golden brown color! It was amazing! Perfect level of sweet and tart flavors, for me, and did not have any weird sweetener after tastes. Of course, not having any idea what my actual proportions were now means I may never achieve this masterpiece again. 😂Still, it's nice when creativity works out. Life is good!
As someone who developed gout last fall and gave up 90+% of added sugar as part of a diet designed to lower uric acid production I very much look forward to the next installment. I tried using allulose and monk fruit sweetener for some baking tasks but the indigestibility led to the same gi tract problems as too much fiber (allulose farts is a fun term to search for!).
N of 1 here, Whole Food Plant Based for about 8 years now. Dropped in weight and cholesterol at the beginning, and have stayed steady in terms of weight and cholesterol since. Eat ad libitum as much fruit (including dried) as I wish. No added sugar or oil. It is easy once you get used to it, and keeps things simple. Whether it is because I eat less 'sugars' or because there is so much fiber and nutrients I get together with my sugars is an interesting academic question, but pragmatically it just works.
I feel like we just need a classification of sugaroids the way we have metaloids. Metaloids are things that tick the boxes of metals... sort of... sometimes... some of them. But they aren't all-the-way metals or all-the-time metals or some other limiting factor, but they're more like metals than they are non-metals so we just call them metaloid. As for glucoses, I'd give it a long E like 'indices' and... many general greek plurals.
Note that High Fructose Corn Surup (HFCS) is around 50/50 glucose fructose, it is high in fructose compared to regular corn syrup, which is all glucose (made by breaking down cornstarch, which is long chains of glucose linked together, into individual glucose units). HFCS usually comes in 2 varieties: -HFCS42 which is 42% fructose and 58% glucose (mostly used in processed food and breakfast cereal) -HFCS55 which is 55% fructise and 45% glucose (mostly used in softdrinks) -Other ratios of fructose:glucose are possible but uncommon The sugar composition of honey will vary by source, but generally also contain slightly more fructose than glucose (although it may also contain small amounts of sucrose, which is 50/50 fructose and glucose, and maltose which is 2 glucoses, which might offset things, but it's not guaranteed). Agave syrup, another sweetner beloved by hipsters, when made from blue agave, has around 56%-60% fructose but only 20% glucose, and traces of sucrose, so even higher fructose:glucose ratio than the HFCS55. If made from green agave, however, it's mostly sucrose. In other words, you probably don't need to worry about HFCS too much unless you are particularly sensitive to fructose or if you drink a lot of soda sweetened with HFCS.
Adam, you never fail to impress! Thank you for such in-depth information about sugar! You blew my mind with ants making honey! Down another rabbit hole I go... lol Hopefully I can impress you with this other random fact: certain ant species also grow mushrooms! Seriously, look it up!
Glucose apparently derives from Greek gleukos, so the plural would be glucoi, not the Latinate gluci, or some such. PS, the amount of pedantry in these podcasts is epic. 😍
While I agree that if someone's takeaway is "I can eat as much fruit as I want", that's good. However, the much more realistic switch, the one I've experienced people deciding on in real life, is "I need to switch from soda to storebought juice with no added sugar". That's a ton of "natural" sugar, usually no fiber, and no vitamins you couldn't get elsewhere. Maybe juice is better than soda, but most of the time I doubt it's by much.
You should do a podcast on FODMAPs. The science is super interesting in how eating a diet that’s low in FODMAPs helps people with IBS. It’s not a fad diet ether, as it not designed to help you lose weight but help you manage your symptoms of IBS. Fructose is consider a high fodmap food but what’s interesting if they find people who add extra glucose to their foods that it doesn’t help with the absorption of fructose.
You are definitely my favorite teacher. Teacher of... well... everything! Thank for being so clear, insightful and talkative. Now: mi dispiace ma... in italiano, the plural of glucosa is actually glucose. With an "e", as it's a feminine word. "Le glucose" though would be a badass name for a female mobster gang. Auguri and keep it up!
Where I live now in Malaysia stingless bees are kept, friend of mine sells the honey on his market stall and also I find the occasional wild hive when out walking in the forest.
Maltodextrin food additives are such a common commercial food lie. Less sugar/Sugar free pudding, main ingredient: maltodextrin. How is that legal marketing? Let people eat sugar, if they want. Yes, even if they are overweight or diabetic. Their choice, none of my damn business. I don't know their life, no fat shaming. But don't lie and trick them into it!
@@MrCPPG That's what they count on. For easy sales they are intentionally tricking people, who may be honestly trying to avoid sugar for their health, into ingesting it. If it wasn't a food grade ingredient we would call that a poisoning attempt. Needs to be made illegal. The opposition to those kind of laws try to spin it into some kind "people should be free to eat junk food" issue, of course. It's a tempting argument. Eating those sugar free pudding cups probably did feel very free and the truth is annoying.
Hey Adam, it was an awesome episode. I'm actually REALLY interested in this subject, I'm a first year med student. Could you please add the links to the other studies you mentioned trough out the episode, thank you very much.
a video going over how consumption of ultra processed foods, particularly fast food, effects our body from the time of it hitting our tongues to the time its digested would be amazing. i just watched something that went over that but the presenter did not name sources. she claimed that ultra processed foods digest faster causing because they had been stripped down so much causing spikes in insulin and that the additives cause inflammation in the body because our cells dont know what to do with them so our immune systems become aggravated. as someone who does not have the healthiest diet and has struggled for decades with acne and seb derm, it would be nice to hear from someone who actually does the research and shares sources
I have a gripe. HFCS often has less fructose than glucose. There are different kinds, but "high" is relative to the amount in corn syrup, not to the glucose. Most solid food HFCS is lower, like 40:60 - 45:55 while a lot of soda and such uses more like 55:45. It's worth noting that, while honey and agave are touted as healthy alternatives to sugar, they are essentially HFCS. Agave is particularly high in fructose, up to 70% iirc
Adam I have been a big fan for a long time. You were the first cooking UA-cam show I subscribed to. That being said, I was a fan of the short format videos - I simply don’t have time to consume content that is an hour in length. The videos that you used to release that were very targeted, on topic and to the point - I could watch them, but also search for them later and know you got to your point quickly - were, in my (completely un-asked for) opinion, some of the best cooking videos on the internet. I don’t understand why you’ve switched to this long form “podcast” type video - they’re simply too long for me to have time to consume. While you haven’t lost a fan - never that - unfortunately you have lost a regular viewer, for whatever that’s worth.
I live in the Amazon rainforest where there are abundance of banana everywhere, we even have a soup that is made by 7 different types of bananas. It's way more difficult to find candy bars here in the rainforest XDDDD
I lost 30 pounds while in southeast asia for a summer eating crazy amounts of fruit. Meat, rice or noods, tiny amount of cooked veg here and there, and tons of fruit throughout the day and for desert.
Another way dietitians compare sugar is complex vs simple carb containing foods. Complex carbs are high in fiber and usually found in fruits/vegetables/while grains. Simple carbs are low in fiber; like soda, juice, or candy. This straightens some of the questions that come up with natural vs artificial.
Sugar is a bomb. By the way, I have difficulty communicating because I had a stroke in Broca’s area, the part of the brain that controls speech. 2/8/2021 but I lived again. (My wife helped me compose this.)
Great episode. It caught my attention that when you were talking about the link between fructose and asthma. The recent hate on gas stoves because there’s a statistical link between gas stoves and asthma, but I wonder, did they take into account that poorer areas would have unvented gas stoves, but they’d also have poorer diets with higher fructose consumption. There are so many variables that studies can lean towards or ignore certain factors depending on who’s funding it.
Endurance athletes take advantage of the alternate pathways for glucose and fructose absorption to jam as much fuel into their bodies to sustain intense workloads, and to stave off glycogen depletion ("hitting the wall" or "bonking"). Other podcasts have illustrated how body builders use (or misuse) protein and other additives to gain an edge over their competition, and the same is true for endurance athletes who try to optimize carbohydrate ingestion for performance. Cyclist, who can carry food with them, are commonly advised to ingest 1g (or more) per kg of body weight per hour of a 60/40 or 50/50 mixture of fructose/glucose. Maltodextrin is commonly used as the glucose component and form the bulk ingredient for energy gels and bars. Ketones are now being explored as a tertiary source of fuel. It's important to note here how sugar is being used in its proper context: fuel, not food.
i noticed processed sugar (or added sugars) gives me heartburn, and my chronic bronchitis also gets much worse, i cough more and breathing is more difficult, my throat gets all gunked up. i did not know fructose was more water soluble than glucose, but now it makes sense why my body reacts this way to artificially sweet things, but not to naturally sweet things like fruit. i should mention i live in europe, high fructose corn syrup is not really a thing here.
My relationship with sugar is long and tortured. As a kid, I lived on sugar until I was hospitalized with malnutrition and kidney disease. In recent years, I found myself going keto for awhile. It wasn't deliberate, I just listened to what my body told me and ate accordingly. After all that, I lost 60 lbs., without trying, again, I shut up and listened. At the present, I understand how many carbs of what kind I can handle in a day, a week, a month. I mostly eat a healthy diet, but I have splurges of sin once in awhile. Today's dinner is mackerel casserole, with potatoes filling the dish (boiled, steamed-off), canned mackerel, chiles, evaporated milk, a carrot and some peas, with sauteed onion and celery added, salt, pepper, garlic, and dill. Topped with Panko (my first time ever using it). Oh, and an egg. Anyway, I'm babbling, it's rum-and-making-dinner time, so I'll go do that. Thanks for the great content, Adam. I am always entertained and educated, which is my ideal UA-cam channel.
It is interesting that the liver, in metabolizing sugars and sugar substitutes, include brief transitional forms through formaldehyde to formalin, never stored or retained, just a point along a longer metabolic chain.
I read somewhere that you can eat 20% more fructose before your brain starts to feel you had enough. So after soda companies switched to HFCS the bottle went from 16 to 20 oz. I can't remember the source, so take with grain of salt.
So much of what we call things is basically the equivalent to what engineers do nowadays with how they name things, "just put a placeholder that describes the thing until i find something better", but then you never find a name and just call it the name you initially had. 'Grit' really was just the name that some guy who was experimenting gave the name to the weird sweet thing they got in the pot and then they never gave it an actual name.
I'm weird. I've been on the anti sugar train for like 6 years. Generally, i avoid any kind of "added" sugar, but have no problem with fruit, as long as its actually eaten, not juiced. I'd much rather drink a diet coke than regular coke, but sparingly either. I feel like most processed sugars are just injections into the "food" we eat in mass, so your best bet is to just eat as natural as possible. 1 coke is like 8 oranges without any of the pulp and fibre... thats a lot of oranges.
I'll be turning 28 this year. One thing I can remember about my early childhood, besides the Got Milk campaigns, is the "if it ends with 'ose, then it's gross" campaign. It was to help us kids identify all the different types of sugars in food, so that we can better control our intake. Glucose, maltose, dextrose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and more are all things I learned about because of this. It's crazy the criticism that campaigns like DARE, Got Milk, and the one I mentioned here get, but they certainly do have a lasting effect and impact. The problem is that the people making these campaigns are educated and intelligent, while the people targeted(kids) generally are not. To pick up on this implication of intake control through identification only worked for the few who were keen enough at that young age to pick up on it. It really left A LOT to be desired, because most people didn't get it and were left thinking, "what is the point" because the point went above their heads.
27:27 iirc, hfcs is still more glucose than fructose, afaik normal corn syrup is like mostly just glucose so even less than half fructose is still high in comparison
Yep. About 40:60 for solid food and 55:45 for liquid food. The "high" in HFCS is compared to regular corn syrup, not the ratio to glucose. HFCS is very similar to honey.
boomer here. when i was growing up and reading strange science facts, one of the most common was "a lemon has more sugar in it than a watermelon." don't know how accurate that is, but it has stuck with me for five decades
Hey Adam, I missed something in the sugar paper at the end. You mentioned that the paper loosly states that a diet high in added sugar might increase the risk of CVD, the scientist did offer some explanations but I didn't hear the word 'fats'. Might it be that the group consuming a lot of added sugar also consumes a lot of saturated fat? I mean, often times, cake, waffles and such are high in sugars, but in (saturated) fat too. If they didn't account for this covariate, it could've lead to wrong statistical conclusions due to (multi)collinearity.
Listened to this on podcast but wanted to comment something. I absolutely don't doubt the science, however "sugar is sugar" isn't just a "common sense" thing that people say. My dad is diabetic and this is the advice he's gotten from his doctor. I'm not sure how much the science and understanding has changed in this area but taken from the perspective of a diabetic who needs to be careful with sugar intake even in naturally occurring cases, the phrase is valid because it's less about long term effects and more about immediate need and potential dangers.
Well this is a great video. There are ways to produce L-Glucose in vast amounts by bio reactors and editing genomes of single cell organisms, not that there is much point to it. As we saw with plain chemistry, producing the mirror molecule or other mirrored axis, can lead to extreme problems with health. Contergan probably the best known case. Just chemically creating sugar from raw resources, would result in a D/L mix. (racemic glucose) Burkholderia caryophylli is one of a few known organism to be able to metabolize L-Glucose and potentially the one of the best model organism to learn and create a bioreactor for it's production.
The quote roughly means the folowing. Glut 5 is a transporter. It is a gate that gets sugar from out to in the cell. However itself must be in the membrane. If the glut 5 is not on the membrane it is not in contact with the outside. So no entry. Glucose triggers thr thing that pushes glut 5 to the membrane from inside the cell. Passive, it is like a dam holding back water. The limiting factor is the number of openings, or transporters. Fructose does not trigger such a large glut 5 response as sugar.
The only damage I inflicted to myself while eating a diet of 5-10 portions of fruit every day was to my tooth enamel... acid in fruit dissolved some of those, due to my inadequate toothbrushing. So while Adam is really encouraging to consumption of natural sugar, keep brushing your teeth just the same as a diet high in free sugar. Metabolically, you'll be absolutely fine! (My teeth look fine- the enamel is just slightly thinner than the average person's enamel)
From Brazil here. Just came back from a friend's house on the beach, north coast of Sao Paulo state, and guess what? Dude's got a small beehive in his backyard, the stingless kind, honey that's bit more liquid-y than the ones you usually get at the market (even here). It's delicious because it's not so overwhelmingly sweet, and it's great on toast for breakfast. Just had to say something when I heard him talking about it.
I failed 9th grade chemistry 13 times...all on the same day. I passed on sweet # 14 because they had to give me the first test again & I remembered one of the answers. One question. My teacher very kindly & gently told me I was part of the reason she was going on a year's sabbatical. I think she was slipping into a fuge state. I watched her stumble away to pack her office. Poor woman. I hope she recovered. Currently I live an almost 100% sugar-less life, including fruit...(I'm fighting chronic illness/infection/genetic conditions). And yet, and yet you suckered me in. "You sneaky naughty thing, you." -My Sister Well played Adam, well played.
i’d love to see a video talking about allulose, maybe make some desserts using it instead of a glycemic sugar, caramelizing it is something no other substitute can do (well except tagatose but nobody makes that, and i’m sure there’s other sweet sugars that are non glycemic). also in the sequel i hope you mention the cool study where they added allulose to food without removing other carbs and it lowered the glucose spike
It probably should be Gloukoi for the plural of Glucose, it comes from Greek apparently. The reason that paper outlines for why fructose is absorbed more slowly than glucose has to do with how it is absorbed, fructose relies on facilitated diffusion and transport proteins (stuff that requires energy and specific proteins, therefore if you only have so many of that transport protein you cannot absorb all the fructose at once), glucose uses passive diffusion (high concentration to low across a membrane). It sounds a lot like a question you would get on an AP Bio test
~33:00 You can actually, kinda, taste starch as sweet. If you chew good (like german) bread for a while, ~20s maybe, you will actually taste sweet, because the enzymes in your saliva breakdown the starch from the bread and turn it into glucose which can bond to your taste buds.
Adam - I love everything you do, but my favorite thing of all is the billy joel/sting podcast with Meg. It is the funniest thing I ever heard and Meg is hilarious. Will you/could you and Meg please do more of these? Or was it just a pandemic thing? It's the best thing you do!
One interesting thing with fructose is that quite a bunch (perhaps up to 40% in the western world) have some form of intolerance to it (much less discussed than lactose intolerance). That can have in extreme forms quite nasty side effects (especially for the stomach), but stays often undetected.
Great podcast! Though I think a lot of people already had the take-away "all added/refined sugars are bad" in recent years, looking at the many health bloggers who promoted agave syrup, coconut sugar, smoothies, or those cakes where blended dates and bananas were all the sweeteners used but that still came out on the same calorie count as your regular cake. Seems to me it's less about the source of the sugar and more about form: your regular banana takes a while to eat, requires chewing, and will leave you fairly full, no need for a second banana. But a smoothie with banana and some other fruits can be gulped down quickly and will not fill you up as well, so besides being already more fruit (and thus more sugar) than the single banana, it also more easily invites a second portion (and blended/juiced fruits seem to taste sweeter? And sweetness invites more eating). Idk about the cake though - does the act of chopping the fruit and baking it already destroy the good effects of the fibrous "wrapper"? I'd love to know if there are studies into that. Fascinating topic, sugar.
You could completely reverse that and say that a smoothie lets you gulp down a cup of kale, a scoop of protein powder, and an extra cup of water more easily thanks to the sweetness of the banana.
That study had one major flaw. It didn’t control for calories. A study done comparing 100g of sugar per day vs 10g saw no difference in health markers with similar amounts of fat loss between groups. Both were in a caloric deficit. If you don’t control for calories, then of course the high sugar group will have worse outcomes because they will consume more calories by default.
Can you add talks about those low/no calories sweeteners when mixed with table sugar as well. Once fall season comes around I like to make a lot of fruit/vegetable desserts and I am hoping to find a middle ground between no calorie sweeteners and just using sugar.
Vitamins are basically catalysts. Here‘s thinking that the vitamins in a plant help that plant build up its structures, and then helps you break down (digest) those same plant structures. There‘s a nice symmetry there, no?
Hey Adam, as someone who is currently in higher education, thank you for helping teach me how to read and understand research studies better. It has helped a lot with essays and research papers that require going through dozens of studies and figuring out which ones are more valuable than others.
as someone who is biochemist, please, read books, don't listen to this guy, this is a mess he said here, I'm getting a rush from all the wrong he said
@@mimosveta you need some lessons at reading yourself because OP said nothing about the actual contents. Adam is not a biochemist so inaccuracies are to be expected
@@mimosveta could a comment be more ridiculous =) troll alarm ^^
@@mimosveta what did he said that was wrong?
@@mimosveta I'm curious. What was he wrong about?
Also, it seems like the obvious underlying variable in the added sugar study was lifestyle outside of eating. People who eat more whole, unprocessed foods also tend to have a larger health focus that includes exercise and general healthy living techniques. I'd love to see a meta-analysis that controlled for weekly exercise, sleep habits, etc.
I think the point here is that people are being forced to eat highly processed sugars and hydrogenated/vegetable/seed oils in order to subsidize the American corn/cotton industries and the government really doesn't give a shit about it's populace's health. Heck, most of these oils were only considered fit for industrial usage until companies realized you chemically alter it so that it didn't stink...
There is a reason why health conscious people steer clear of highly processed sugars and oils (sometimes eliminating it from their diet completely if they can afford it) and that's because it's an addictive poison that's pumped into everything and the temptation to indulge and keep indulging is programmed into 21st century children from birth (think corporate propaganda getting kids to recognize their slop mascot).
Did this study not control for those things? That would be ridiculous.
They should study freelee the banana girl lol
Or you can compare it with countries where people don't eat added sugar and only eat unprocessed foods for cultural reasons and not for health reasons
@@pikapi6993 I come from rice eating culture. The starches function like sugar. People are clueless regarding Asians every time they say they are still thin when their liver is fattening up and Medicare has a lower BMI threshold for them to qualify for diabetes screening.
Naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy.
The problem is that many processed foods use apple juice concentrate (or some other fruit juice) as a loophole to prevent their sugars from getting classified as 'added sugars', despite apple juice concentrate being pure sugar water and having basically no fiber or micronutrients.
That's what I find stupid about “natural” sugars, they're just as bad as “processed” sugars
@@legoworks-cg5hk I think that's why the term "added sugar" came to be. It doesn't matter where it came from, if it is in concentrated/extracted form, it has risk associated
I really don't understand how concentrated fruity juice is not considered added sugar 😑 even when I make a natural orange juice for myself, I count it as added sugar for the day
Whats even worse?
Fructose seems to be the worst sugar of them all. Not only will it be metabolized to glucose - no in the process it damages your liver.
Because in contrast to other sugars it can only be processed in your liver and not in your whole body.
@@auricia201 added sugar was a compromise that the government made with farmers so that their produce would be seen as healthier than something with comparable sugars
Hey Adam! Thanks for today's video. Because you mentioned the recent study regarding Erythritol at the end, I think there's something important to keep in mind about it for you to take a gander at in preparation for the next episode if you get the chance. Erythritol is a naturally occurring substance in the human body, which gets produced around the time of cardiovascular events as it turns out. That study on the effects of erythritol, as far as I understand it, did not control for naturally occurrences of Erythritol versus added erythritol to food. Which could be especially problematic when drawing conclusions about it's alleged link to cardiovascular events. Looking forward to the next ep!
Wow
saw a comment on a short by dr karan i think is the channel that summed it up well, “it’s easier to clickbait than to prove causality” or something to that effect, it could eventually be a test for cardiovascular health, tell a patient to not eat any erythritol for a few days to a week, see their level, and get an idea of their risk. and most likely i think the food industry will switch to another sugar alcohol if only for positive press
I know I could google it, but erithritol is endogenous in our bodies? I've never heard this.
@@fleskenialation Yep. I would link it for you, but UA-cam tends to block links.
Since I have heart problems in family history, I have decided to limit the intake of erythritol in my diet. I can't test myself for its production in the case of a cardiovascular event, but I don't want to add to the possible problem. It would be ironic if the body actually makes erythritol as a protection reaction to the event, similar to the increased production of white blood cells in response to an infection. Scientific conclusions can be skewed in the favor of certain expectations.
One of the "gotchas" of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that there are many common formulations, and the formulation does not need to be listed on the ingredients label. For instance, coke and sprite use HFCS55 which is 55% fructose and 45% glucose which could lead to the malabsorption of the fructose, but many/most fruit juices use HFCS42 which is 42% fructose and 58% glucose so we would expect even more efficient absorption of the fructose than with sucrose (50/50 glucose/fructose). Both products would just list "High Fructose Corn Syrup" on their label.
I started watching what I eat about 8 months ago, around when you posted the episode about seed oils. I haven’t cut out sugar entirely, but I’ve changed all of my soda drinks to diet soda, which has helped me maintain a calorie deficit alongside more frequent exercise. Since then I’ve dropped 35 lbs, I look a lot better, and I feel a lot better in my own skin, which is something I think you’ve talked about at some point
As I understand it, diet drinks are just diabetes waiting to happen. You tell your body and prime it for sweet things that never come, so the undigestible sweet chemicals mess up the natural cycle, increasing your chance of issues.
Gecko: You're kidding, right? Diet soda is worse than regular soda. BOTH are terrible for your body. See: The Dark Side of Diet Soda That Nobody Talks About
Diet drinks are poison.
Good work!
I hope you didn’t listen to his bs about seed oils
-us to -i is how you pluralize some words with Latin roots, like cactus/cacti.
Words with Greek roots, however, are different. For example, octopus has Greek roots, so the plural isn't octopi, it'd actually be octopodes - but, honestly, the correct answer is probably just octopuses. Octopi would be considered a hypercorrection, by the way.
Anyways, glucose has Greek roots (comes from γλεῦκος/gleukos). Greek words that end in -os/-ος become plural by changing -os/-ος to -ee/οι. So, the plural of γλεῦκος/gleukos would be γλεῦκοι/gleukee.
Bringing that to English, I'd guess the correct plural of glucose would be something like glucee.
*Edit:* Y'know, while researching this comment, I ran into the corrections that the people replying to me have said. They're right, my information is incomplete (and likely wrong in some parts), but thanks to Cunningham's Law, I've now learned *why* I was wrong, so that's neat!
Not all words with Latin roots ending in -us are pluralized with -i.
Fourth declension nouns end in -us even in their plural nominative form
following the octopusses rule (considering we don't use greek plurals, ever) it would be glucoses. I personally would just say glucose molecules or sorts of glucose
Glucose has Greek roots, as you said, but it is one of these linguistic exceptions. The -ose is from the glucose and not a result of the anglicization of the Greek "gleukos" as the "gluco" comes from the Greek "glukus" and the -ose is etymologically from glucose (ie "dextrose" would be from the Greek "dexter" and "-ose" from glucose). So the plural of glucose would follow regular English rules to glucoses
I'm pretty sure it's glucose and several molecules of glucose. Like there's water and several bottles of water.
@@PinHeadSupliciumwtf that feels right when I say it out loud so I like your answer best.
Whatever is best understood and easiest to say morphologically with my face.
A wise man once said "the best sugar is the one we made along the way"
The sugar was inside us all along!
- Hitler, I think
@@Cyril29a You know Ragussy is full of sugar, he is so sweet
@@mummer7337 When he grows old and dies we should make him in to cake and eat it in his honour
Isn't that a lyric from a Def Leppard song?
I'd love to hear you do a podcast where you examine the whole dairy cycle, from grass to cow to milk to human cowsumption and nutrition...
I’ll second that.
He made one on latose
Human cowsumption
Just gonna comment this after looking at newest first on some of your non traditional recipes. There are SOOO many haters who don’t use constructive criticism and just discard a recipe because it’s not what they do, which annoys me to no end. Please keep going with your cooking videos and don’t listen to people like them.
I was born in the mid 80's and grew up staying away from fat and salt but loving sugar. From that i prefer to snack on candy over salty snacks. Now my doctor says I have to cut the sugar out of my diet and it feels like my happiness has been taken from me.
Thanks for another great podcast Adam. FYI from a biochemist’s standpoint, we would say “glucose molecules” or “molecules of glucose”, rather than pluralizing the chemical name. In that way, it’s similar to saying “loaves of bread” rather than something like “breads”. We pluralize the units, not the substance.
One more chemistry lesson: Freezing point depression is one of a series of properties known as “colligative properties of solutions”, which depends on the number or concentration of particles in a solution, but not on what those particles are. Since fructose and glucose have the same molecular weight and both dissolve into water as one particle per molecule, a certain mass (or weight) of glucose would have the same effect on freezing point depression as the same mass of fructose. However, disaccharides (like sucrose) have a higher molecular weight, but still dissolve in water as only one particle per molecule, so a certain mass of sucrose would not lower the freezing point as much as the same mass of glucose or fructose. By the way, table salt (sodium chloride) has a much lower formula weight than any sugar molecules, and it dissociates into two particles per formula unit when dissolved in water (sodium and chloride ions). This makes sodium chloride a highly effective substance for lowering the freezing point of water, which (combined with its low cost and relative environmental safety) is why it is the primary component in chemical mixtures used to melt ice on roadways.
I am one of those listening for the first time (you're welcome). I can't belive the video was almost an hour long, it went by like 15min. I subbed probably around halfway, you are a great communicator.
Another great listen, Adam! Thank you for digging into fine details on the things you discuss, it makes any topic youve covered infinitely more listenable. Keep it up!
“Rare sugar” is a great name for something…a band, an album, a movie.
Probably anything except a TV show for some reason.
I remember years ago watching a talk by Robert Lustig (pediatric endocrinologist) about the dangers of refined sugars. It’s a fascinating but confusing topic. I appreciate Adam’s deep dive on sugar.
Dr. Lustig once said "when God made the apple, he packaged the poison with the antidote". That would be, fiber. Fructose is looking like the most problematic sugar for people, but it's a "dose dependent" poison. In natural sources, it would rarely be an issue.
MeUndies are underrated. Got the subscription like a year ago and I’ve been slowly phasing out all my old stuff
I've loosely followed Weight Watchers for years now. I think it's much more useful as a "healthy eating lifestyle" than a "diet", but I also believe that's how we should eat. Count me a believer in their plans.
7:42 i think what you're looking to say is "glucose monomer", monomer as in a single unit (mono) as opposed to a polymer of many of them stuck together
The earliest I've ever been to a podcast.
vinegar is considered a 'sugar' in the sense that it has calories and it is mandatory to put these calories in food labels. If they have calories, where do they fit in our 4 macronutrient model? Carbs!
A comment on acids: All acids are Lewis acids or bases i.e. they either accept (acid) or donate (base) electrons . When a hydrogen is lost or gained during the electron transfer, the molecules can be called Bronsted-Lowry acids (give up a hydrogen) or base (accept a hydrogen). The third type is Arrhenius acids and bases, which are simply the Bronsted-Lowry process done in water wherein the hydrogen leaves as a hydronium ion (in the case of acids), or when the hydrogen is accepted it leaves behind a hydroxyl ion (in the case of bases). So Arrhenius acids are a sub-set of Bronsted-Lowry acids, which are a sub-set of Lewis acids. Love your content Adam! I especially love the deep dive into a topic during the Monday podcasts. Vinegar Chicken on the Right.
As a father of type 1 diabetic I can strongly relate to "It's not sugars but other things it is wrapped in". However I would like to sterss that the way it's wrapped is also important. One big apple has a same amount of sugar as medium banana, but doesn't spike blood glucose as fast and as high as banana. But the moment you pass it through a blender and drink - oh boy, it spikes fast. Baking it also "unwraps" it and makes it faster to digest - BG spikes faster, and as I understand more sugar gets absorbed into blood rather than passing to the large intestine for all the flora.
There's generally accepted rule of thumb in diabetic community to "never drink your carbs" because of these effects (obviously with the exception for emergency carton of juice that insulin-dependent folks keep at hand in case of hypoglycemia)
I made a STEVIA sweetened apple pie the other week. Turned out just like I wanted! No other sugars or sweetners other then the apples and the tiny amount of powdered stevia concentrate. Made it up on the go because I really really wanted pie but not overdo sugar or search for recipes (other then check that pure stevia don't burn to crap, it's fine) and let just do this! It was some fairly sweet red-yellow apples I had at home, not sure what kind. Mixed a few mini scoops of Stevia with a bit of corn starch, cinnamon, cardamon, pinch of salt and coated the cut up apples. Added a splash of water. Only buttered the bottom of the pan and made top crumble crust by chopping wheat flour and one mini scoop of stevia together with a stick of butter, a bit of oatmeal and another small pinch of salt and cardamom and covered the improvised apple filling. Into the oven until it got a pleasing golden brown color!
It was amazing! Perfect level of sweet and tart flavors, for me, and did not have any weird sweetener after tastes. Of course, not having any idea what my actual proportions were now means I may never achieve this masterpiece again. 😂Still, it's nice when creativity works out. Life is good!
I tried your pickup line on my current fling, worked like a charm. Thanks Adam
This was awesome! I especially enjoyed your explanation about malt barley. I used to make my own beer, and would malt my own barley. Lots of fun!
If you haven't seen it Adam has at least one video on malt.
This was super helpful for me as I learn more about my wife's diabetes. Thank you Adam!
As someone who developed gout last fall and gave up 90+% of added sugar as part of a diet designed to lower uric acid production I very much look forward to the next installment. I tried using allulose and monk fruit sweetener for some baking tasks but the indigestibility led to the same gi tract problems as too much fiber (allulose farts is a fun term to search for!).
I've had a few (
as a type 1 diabetic, i am incredibly eager to listen to this one
Yeah… I miss the pod coming out Sunday in Europe :p Another great one Adam!
You make Mondays my favorite day of the week!
N of 1 here, Whole Food Plant Based for about 8 years now. Dropped in weight and cholesterol at the beginning, and have stayed steady in terms of weight and cholesterol since. Eat ad libitum as much fruit (including dried) as I wish. No added sugar or oil. It is easy once you get used to it, and keeps things simple. Whether it is because I eat less 'sugars' or because there is so much fiber and nutrients I get together with my sugars is an interesting academic question, but pragmatically it just works.
I feel like we just need a classification of sugaroids the way we have metaloids. Metaloids are things that tick the boxes of metals... sort of... sometimes... some of them. But they aren't all-the-way metals or all-the-time metals or some other limiting factor, but they're more like metals than they are non-metals so we just call them metaloid.
As for glucoses, I'd give it a long E like 'indices' and... many general greek plurals.
Note that High Fructose Corn Surup (HFCS) is around 50/50 glucose fructose, it is high in fructose compared to regular corn syrup, which is all glucose (made by breaking down cornstarch, which is long chains of glucose linked together, into individual glucose units).
HFCS usually comes in 2 varieties:
-HFCS42 which is 42% fructose and 58% glucose (mostly used in processed food and breakfast cereal)
-HFCS55 which is 55% fructise and 45% glucose (mostly used in softdrinks)
-Other ratios of fructose:glucose are possible but uncommon
The sugar composition of honey will vary by source, but generally also contain slightly more fructose than glucose (although it may also contain small amounts of sucrose, which is 50/50 fructose and glucose, and maltose which is 2 glucoses, which might offset things, but it's not guaranteed).
Agave syrup, another sweetner beloved by hipsters, when made from blue agave, has around 56%-60% fructose but only 20% glucose, and traces of sucrose, so even higher fructose:glucose ratio than the HFCS55.
If made from green agave, however, it's mostly sucrose.
In other words, you probably don't need to worry about HFCS too much unless you are particularly sensitive to fructose or if you drink a lot of soda sweetened with HFCS.
Adam, you never fail to impress! Thank you for such in-depth information about sugar!
You blew my mind with ants making honey! Down another rabbit hole I go... lol
Hopefully I can impress you with this other random fact: certain ant species also grow mushrooms! Seriously, look it up!
Glucose apparently derives from Greek gleukos, so the plural would be glucoi, not the Latinate gluci, or some such. PS, the amount of pedantry in these podcasts is epic. 😍
While I agree that if someone's takeaway is "I can eat as much fruit as I want", that's good. However, the much more realistic switch, the one I've experienced people deciding on in real life, is "I need to switch from soda to storebought juice with no added sugar". That's a ton of "natural" sugar, usually no fiber, and no vitamins you couldn't get elsewhere. Maybe juice is better than soda, but most of the time I doubt it's by much.
The trouble with with natural fruit juice is definitely the sugar in it, especially for little kids and their rotting teeth. It doesn't take much.
Thanks Adam, I spent this time crocheting 6ft/1.8m of honey. I await part 2, I am only 1/2 way finished!
You should do a podcast on FODMAPs. The science is super interesting in how eating a diet that’s low in FODMAPs helps people with IBS. It’s not a fad diet ether, as it not designed to help you lose weight but help you manage your symptoms of IBS. Fructose is consider a high fodmap food but what’s interesting if they find people who add extra glucose to their foods that it doesn’t help with the absorption of fructose.
✨ "It's not the sugar, it's what the sugar comes wrapped in" ✨
And what is that? If you're talking about carbohydrates like pasta and bread, they're all sugar too.
@@pepper419 Thank you, Doctor.
I always look forward to your content, its the best to listen to while cooking or on a long commute
You are definitely my favorite teacher. Teacher of... well... everything! Thank for being so clear, insightful and talkative. Now: mi dispiace ma... in italiano, the plural of glucosa is actually glucose. With an "e", as it's a feminine word. "Le glucose" though would be a badass name for a female mobster gang. Auguri and keep it up!
Where I live now in Malaysia stingless bees are kept, friend of mine sells the honey on his market stall and also I find the occasional wild hive when out walking in the forest.
When you mentioned maltodextrin, I was licking doritos dust off my fingers. I flipped the bag over and verified your correctness.
I wanna lick dorito dust off your fingies
Maltodextrin food additives are such a common commercial food lie. Less sugar/Sugar free pudding, main ingredient: maltodextrin. How is that legal marketing? Let people eat sugar, if they want. Yes, even if they are overweight or diabetic. Their choice, none of my damn business. I don't know their life, no fat shaming. But don't lie and trick them into it!
@@izuela7677 Honestly I did not know it was a sugar. No wonder my A1C is 7.2 ! I used to think the added sugar in tomato sauce was sneaky.
@@MrCPPG That's what they count on. For easy sales they are intentionally tricking people, who may be honestly trying to avoid sugar for their health, into ingesting it. If it wasn't a food grade ingredient we would call that a poisoning attempt. Needs to be made illegal. The opposition to those kind of laws try to spin it into some kind "people should be free to eat junk food" issue, of course. It's a tempting argument. Eating those sugar free pudding cups probably did feel very free and the truth is annoying.
Hey Adam, it was an awesome episode.
I'm actually REALLY interested in this subject, I'm a first year med student. Could you please add the links to the other studies you mentioned trough out the episode, thank you very much.
a video going over how consumption of ultra processed foods, particularly fast food, effects our body from the time of it hitting our tongues to the time its digested would be amazing. i just watched something that went over that but the presenter did not name sources. she claimed that ultra processed foods digest faster causing because they had been stripped down so much causing spikes in insulin and that the additives cause inflammation in the body because our cells dont know what to do with them so our immune systems become aggravated. as someone who does not have the healthiest diet and has struggled for decades with acne and seb derm, it would be nice to hear from someone who actually does the research and shares sources
I always click Like right when then video starts, since I know I'm going to like it anyway.
I have a gripe. HFCS often has less fructose than glucose. There are different kinds, but "high" is relative to the amount in corn syrup, not to the glucose. Most solid food HFCS is lower, like 40:60 - 45:55 while a lot of soda and such uses more like 55:45. It's worth noting that, while honey and agave are touted as healthy alternatives to sugar, they are essentially HFCS. Agave is particularly high in fructose, up to 70% iirc
50:17 First time listener here. ✌️This episode was totally sweet!
Adam I have been a big fan for a long time. You were the first cooking UA-cam show I subscribed to. That being said, I was a fan of the short format videos - I simply don’t have time to consume content that is an hour in length. The videos that you used to release that were very targeted, on topic and to the point - I could watch them, but also search for them later and know you got to your point quickly - were, in my (completely un-asked for) opinion, some of the best cooking videos on the internet. I don’t understand why you’ve switched to this long form “podcast” type video - they’re simply too long for me to have time to consume. While you haven’t lost a fan - never that - unfortunately you have lost a regular viewer, for whatever that’s worth.
I live in the Amazon rainforest where there are abundance of banana everywhere, we even have a soup that is made by 7 different types of bananas. It's way more difficult to find candy bars here in the rainforest XDDDD
I lost 30 pounds while in southeast asia for a summer eating crazy amounts of fruit. Meat, rice or noods, tiny amount of cooked veg here and there, and tons of fruit throughout the day and for desert.
Another way dietitians compare sugar is complex vs simple carb containing foods. Complex carbs are high in fiber and usually found in fruits/vegetables/while grains. Simple carbs are low in fiber; like soda, juice, or candy. This straightens some of the questions that come up with natural vs artificial.
This was extremely interesting, I'm looking forward to part 2.
Fantastic work! Really thoroughly prepared and well presented! Very enjoyable and quite educational aswell.
Sugar is a bomb. By the way, I have difficulty communicating because I had a stroke in Broca’s area, the part of the brain that controls speech. 2/8/2021 but I lived again. (My wife helped me compose this.)
Great episode. It caught my attention that when you were talking about the link between fructose and asthma. The recent hate on gas stoves because there’s a statistical link between gas stoves and asthma, but I wonder, did they take into account that poorer areas would have unvented gas stoves, but they’d also have poorer diets with higher fructose consumption. There are so many variables that studies can lean towards or ignore certain factors depending on who’s funding it.
This podcast was actually a revision for the Biochemistry chapter in my Chemistry book
I feel like I'm being aggressively taught by a caring teacher and I'm *here for it.*
The problem is that, at least in the USA, _everything_ has added sugar. I challenge anyone to find one packaged food that doesn't.
Endurance athletes take advantage of the alternate pathways for glucose and fructose absorption to jam as much fuel into their bodies to sustain intense workloads, and to stave off glycogen depletion ("hitting the wall" or "bonking").
Other podcasts have illustrated how body builders use (or misuse) protein and other additives to gain an edge over their competition, and the same is true for endurance athletes who try to optimize carbohydrate ingestion for performance. Cyclist, who can carry food with them, are commonly advised to ingest 1g (or more) per kg of body weight per hour of a 60/40 or 50/50 mixture of fructose/glucose. Maltodextrin is commonly used as the glucose component and form the bulk ingredient for energy gels and bars. Ketones are now being explored as a tertiary source of fuel. It's important to note here how sugar is being used in its proper context: fuel, not food.
i noticed processed sugar (or added sugars) gives me heartburn, and my chronic bronchitis also gets much worse, i cough more and breathing is more difficult, my throat gets all gunked up. i did not know fructose was more water soluble than glucose, but now it makes sense why my body reacts this way to artificially sweet things, but not to naturally sweet things like fruit.
i should mention i live in europe, high fructose corn syrup is not really a thing here.
My relationship with sugar is long and tortured. As a kid, I lived on sugar until I was hospitalized with malnutrition and kidney disease. In recent years, I found myself going keto for awhile. It wasn't deliberate, I just listened to what my body told me and ate accordingly. After all that, I lost 60 lbs., without trying, again, I shut up and listened. At the present, I understand how many carbs of what kind I can handle in a day, a week, a month. I mostly eat a healthy diet, but I have splurges of sin once in awhile. Today's dinner is mackerel casserole, with potatoes filling the dish (boiled, steamed-off), canned mackerel, chiles, evaporated milk, a carrot and some peas, with sauteed onion and celery added, salt, pepper, garlic, and dill. Topped with Panko (my first time ever using it). Oh, and an egg. Anyway, I'm babbling, it's rum-and-making-dinner time, so I'll go do that. Thanks for the great content, Adam. I am always entertained and educated, which is my ideal UA-cam channel.
It is interesting that the liver, in metabolizing sugars and sugar substitutes, include brief transitional forms through formaldehyde to formalin, never stored or retained, just a point along a longer metabolic chain.
I read somewhere that you can eat 20% more fructose before your brain starts to feel you had enough. So after soda companies switched to HFCS the bottle went from 16 to 20 oz. I can't remember the source, so take with grain of salt.
So much of what we call things is basically the equivalent to what engineers do nowadays with how they name things, "just put a placeholder that describes the thing until i find something better", but then you never find a name and just call it the name you initially had.
'Grit' really was just the name that some guy who was experimenting gave the name to the weird sweet thing they got in the pot and then they never gave it an actual name.
I dig the podcast series. Great content and format, and I’d say even more since your new working schedule.
I'm weird. I've been on the anti sugar train for like 6 years. Generally, i avoid any kind of "added" sugar, but have no problem with fruit, as long as its actually eaten, not juiced. I'd much rather drink a diet coke than regular coke, but sparingly either. I feel like most processed sugars are just injections into the "food" we eat in mass, so your best bet is to just eat as natural as possible. 1 coke is like 8 oranges without any of the pulp and fibre... thats a lot of oranges.
That ad transition was smooth af
I'll be turning 28 this year. One thing I can remember about my early childhood, besides the Got Milk campaigns, is the "if it ends with 'ose, then it's gross" campaign. It was to help us kids identify all the different types of sugars in food, so that we can better control our intake. Glucose, maltose, dextrose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and more are all things I learned about because of this. It's crazy the criticism that campaigns like DARE, Got Milk, and the one I mentioned here get, but they certainly do have a lasting effect and impact. The problem is that the people making these campaigns are educated and intelligent, while the people targeted(kids) generally are not. To pick up on this implication of intake control through identification only worked for the few who were keen enough at that young age to pick up on it. It really left A LOT to be desired, because most people didn't get it and were left thinking, "what is the point" because the point went above their heads.
I always just remember the old Nickelodeon commercial “Sucrose, Dextrose, and Maltose…. Anything that rhymes with GROSS”
27:27 iirc, hfcs is still more glucose than fructose, afaik normal corn syrup is like mostly just glucose so even less than half fructose is still high in comparison
Yep. About 40:60 for solid food and 55:45 for liquid food. The "high" in HFCS is compared to regular corn syrup, not the ratio to glucose. HFCS is very similar to honey.
With all this chemistry talk, we should rename it "Ask Atom"
boomer here. when i was growing up and reading strange science facts, one of the most common was "a lemon has more sugar in it than a watermelon." don't know how accurate that is, but it has stuck with me for five decades
Hey Adam, I missed something in the sugar paper at the end. You mentioned that the paper loosly states that a diet high in added sugar might increase the risk of CVD, the scientist did offer some explanations but I didn't hear the word 'fats'. Might it be that the group consuming a lot of added sugar also consumes a lot of saturated fat? I mean, often times, cake, waffles and such are high in sugars, but in (saturated) fat too. If they didn't account for this covariate, it could've lead to wrong statistical conclusions due to (multi)collinearity.
Thanks Adam for all your research!
Listened to this on podcast but wanted to comment something. I absolutely don't doubt the science, however "sugar is sugar" isn't just a "common sense" thing that people say. My dad is diabetic and this is the advice he's gotten from his doctor. I'm not sure how much the science and understanding has changed in this area but taken from the perspective of a diabetic who needs to be careful with sugar intake even in naturally occurring cases, the phrase is valid because it's less about long term effects and more about immediate need and potential dangers.
Well this is a great video.
There are ways to produce L-Glucose in vast amounts by bio reactors and editing genomes of single cell organisms, not that there is much point to it.
As we saw with plain chemistry, producing the mirror molecule or other mirrored axis, can lead to extreme problems with health.
Contergan probably the best known case.
Just chemically creating sugar from raw resources, would result in a D/L mix. (racemic glucose)
Burkholderia caryophylli is one of a few known organism to be able to metabolize L-Glucose and potentially the one of the best model organism to learn and create a bioreactor for it's production.
The quote roughly means the folowing.
Glut 5 is a transporter. It is a gate that gets sugar from out to in the cell.
However itself must be in the membrane.
If the glut 5 is not on the membrane it is not in contact with the outside. So no entry.
Glucose triggers thr thing that pushes glut 5 to the membrane from inside the cell.
Passive, it is like a dam holding back water. The limiting factor is the number of openings, or transporters.
Fructose does not trigger such a large glut 5 response as sugar.
The only damage I inflicted to myself while eating a diet of 5-10 portions of fruit every day was to my tooth enamel... acid in fruit dissolved some of those, due to my inadequate toothbrushing. So while Adam is really encouraging to consumption of natural sugar, keep brushing your teeth just the same as a diet high in free sugar.
Metabolically, you'll be absolutely fine!
(My teeth look fine- the enamel is just slightly thinner than the average person's enamel)
That's why I only eat my fruit through a straw. I takes a lot longer, but protects the tooth enamel.
20:20 I did not know that fructose is sweeter than glucose. But that explains why I and my sister do not like the taste of honey: it's sickly sweet.
16:34 totally true, my grandma love their bees, she has jataí, uruçu and mandaçaia. Never bit anyone, but some twine in the hair of some people.
From Brazil here. Just came back from a friend's house on the beach, north coast of Sao Paulo state, and guess what? Dude's got a small beehive in his backyard, the stingless kind, honey that's bit more liquid-y than the ones you usually get at the market (even here). It's delicious because it's not so overwhelmingly sweet, and it's great on toast for breakfast. Just had to say something when I heard him talking about it.
3:32 "like your mother and I did in the old days"💀💀
I failed 9th grade chemistry 13 times...all on the same day. I passed on sweet # 14 because they had to give me the first test again & I remembered one of the answers. One question. My teacher very kindly & gently told me I was part of the reason she was going on a year's sabbatical. I think she was slipping into a fuge state. I watched her stumble away to pack her office. Poor woman. I hope she recovered.
Currently I live an almost 100% sugar-less life, including fruit...(I'm fighting chronic illness/infection/genetic conditions).
And yet, and yet you suckered me in. "You sneaky naughty thing, you."
-My Sister
Well played Adam, well played.
i’d love to see a video talking about allulose, maybe make some desserts using it instead of a glycemic sugar, caramelizing it is something no other substitute can do (well except tagatose but nobody makes that, and i’m sure there’s other sweet sugars that are non glycemic).
also in the sequel i hope you mention the cool study where they added allulose to food without removing other carbs and it lowered the glucose spike
Allulose browns very easily too, just like fructose. Also it has the same tingly-spicy taste.
It probably should be Gloukoi for the plural of Glucose, it comes from Greek apparently. The reason that paper outlines for why fructose is absorbed more slowly than glucose has to do with how it is absorbed, fructose relies on facilitated diffusion and transport proteins (stuff that requires energy and specific proteins, therefore if you only have so many of that transport protein you cannot absorb all the fructose at once), glucose uses passive diffusion (high concentration to low across a membrane). It sounds a lot like a question you would get on an AP Bio test
4:12 it also describes all fats! and also fun note there about how the definition of carbohydrates inherits the messy definition of sugars
also, there are "amino sugars" which have nitrogen in them!
i'm so glad you mentioned L-glucose! that's a good sign for how deep you go
also, it would be AWESOME if you could get scientists on the pod to do more in-depth talks on these topics
~33:00 You can actually, kinda, taste starch as sweet. If you chew good (like german) bread for a while, ~20s maybe, you will actually taste sweet, because the enzymes in your saliva breakdown the starch from the bread and turn it into glucose which can bond to your taste buds.
Adam - I love everything you do, but my favorite thing of all is the billy joel/sting podcast with Meg. It is the funniest thing I ever heard and Meg is hilarious. Will you/could you and Meg please do more of these? Or was it just a pandemic thing? It's the best thing you do!
One interesting thing with fructose is that quite a bunch (perhaps up to 40% in the western world) have some form of intolerance to it (much less discussed than lactose intolerance). That can have in extreme forms quite nasty side effects (especially for the stomach), but stays often undetected.
Great podcast! Though I think a lot of people already had the take-away "all added/refined sugars are bad" in recent years, looking at the many health bloggers who promoted agave syrup, coconut sugar, smoothies, or those cakes where blended dates and bananas were all the sweeteners used but that still came out on the same calorie count as your regular cake. Seems to me it's less about the source of the sugar and more about form: your regular banana takes a while to eat, requires chewing, and will leave you fairly full, no need for a second banana. But a smoothie with banana and some other fruits can be gulped down quickly and will not fill you up as well, so besides being already more fruit (and thus more sugar) than the single banana, it also more easily invites a second portion (and blended/juiced fruits seem to taste sweeter? And sweetness invites more eating). Idk about the cake though - does the act of chopping the fruit and baking it already destroy the good effects of the fibrous "wrapper"? I'd love to know if there are studies into that. Fascinating topic, sugar.
You could completely reverse that and say that a smoothie lets you gulp down a cup of kale, a scoop of protein powder, and an extra cup of water more easily thanks to the sweetness of the banana.
This was extremely interesting and very enlightening Adam! Thank you ❤
@16:47 so Dr Evil was just trying to indicate “strong little mandibles” all along 😮
That study had one major flaw. It didn’t control for calories. A study done comparing 100g of sugar per day vs 10g saw no difference in health markers with similar amounts of fat loss between groups. Both were in a caloric deficit. If you don’t control for calories, then of course the high sugar group will have worse outcomes because they will consume more calories by default.
14:10 does that mean "Sahara" (as in the desert) might etymologically be a predecessor of that Sanskrit word?
Can you add talks about those low/no calories sweeteners when mixed with table sugar as well.
Once fall season comes around I like to make a lot of fruit/vegetable desserts and I am hoping to find a middle ground between no calorie sweeteners and just using sugar.
18:10 isn't it L-glucose that is useless for us? By the way us there a connection between saccar and Sahara desert name?
Vitamins are basically catalysts. Here‘s thinking that the vitamins in a plant help that plant build up its structures, and then helps you break down (digest) those same plant structures. There‘s a nice symmetry there, no?