this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Good to know, I’ll stick to sodas full of sugar, no problem can come from that 👍
The article says that sugar based drinks are far worse for your health than diet versions.
Your average pseudoscience obsessed health hobbyist is never going to notice that particular detail though.
What kind of sugar? High fructose corn syrup or sugar?
HFCS is metabolized in the liver making it far more damaging to the body. And soda that uses real sugar typically has a lower sugar content. Soda with real sugar also imparts a feeling of fullness, typically resulting in people drinking less.
I am going to need a source that HFCS is worse than sucrose for your liver.
People hear "high fructose" in High Fructose Corn Syrup and assume it's in comparison to other sugars, it is not. High Fructose corn syrup is a name to differentiate it from regular corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose.
Let's look at the real differences between HFCS and sucrose or table sugar. Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. HFCS is usually 55% fructose in beverages and 42% in most other HCFS sweetened products. This means that typically the High Fructose corn syrup has less fructose than regular sugar.
You could focus on beverages, but 5% isn't a huge difference, and if your going to talk about the dangers of sugary beverages it's always important to remind people that fruit juice has A LOT of fructose (go figure).
Sugar itself is the problem, monitor intake. HCFS is only an issue because the price drove down the cost of sweetening foods to everyone's detriment.
My brother in Christ, why is sucrose bad for your liver? Because it is metabolized into glucose and... Fructose
The metabolism of sucrose into glucose and fructose happens in the small intestines. Fructose enters the bloodstream and is metabolized by the liver.
(Here's a study on the liver effects.)[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6549781/]
It doesn't specifically say that fructose has a worse effect on the liver than sucrose, but it does say that fructose is 2x sweeter than glucose, which makes it more addicting, which causes you to drink more because you crave it. So I went looking up sweetness scales and fructose is also sweeter than sucrose (which is still sweeter than glucose), sometimes by a significant margin.
So if both are bad on the liver, fructose could possibly be worse because of a higher level of addiction due to sweetness level, which causes you to consume more than you might with just sucrose.
But sucrose is 50/50 fructose and glucose. And HFCS is either 42/58 or 55/45. They are basically the same thing.
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Don't most sodas have corn syrup and stuff instead of sugar?
In the US.
You probably meant sucrose. Sucralose is a calorie-free sweetener.
And, as a quick aside, a side effect of the sweetener is to damage DNA.
Most of the smaller soda brands in the US use sugar, too. Just the big boys still using corn syrup at this point.