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by jjoonathan 4726 days ago
First of all, I tend to agree with the sibling posts accusing you of failing to maintain scholarly decorum. The "paid shill" remark was uncalled for, even if I tend to agree with your criticisms (at least, all but the most crucial one).

> pondering whether sucrose breaks down into fructose and glucose immediately: No, it doesn't.

Can you substantiate this further (say, with an in-vivo sucrose half-life)? I don't have journal access at the moment, so the best I could find was this study: http://ajplegacy.physiology.org/content/59/1/413.extract which seems to support what you claim (only 90% inversion after 6.5 hours in rabbits), but I'd still like to see something more modern and preferably in humans.

> Additionally, this study covers rats which were given strict diets

Strict diets? It seems to me like they had unmeasured and uncontrolled access to chow and sugar solution ("controlled" only on the basis of availability time)! I tend to agree with the grandparent post that the observed results could be caused by the relative sweetness of HFCS driving the rats to continue consuming HFCS past the point where they would have stopped consuming sucrose solution. Since humans tend to consume drinks in fixed quantities (8oz, 16oz) not entirely chosen on the bases of satiety, I question the relevance of this study to human health.

> you contradict yourself by noting (correctly) that HFCS is not half-and-half fructose and glucose

You quibble. I'll take it back iff you substantiate the implicit claim (which occurs under the assumption that you weren't quibbling) that the 5% or 7% difference in sugar concentrations creates a disproportionate effect on energy output or weight gain.

2 comments

Here is a free article covering a study in humans comparing the pharmacokinetics of high-fructose corn syrup to those of sucrose [1]. Key figure showing blood concentrations of some sugars is here [2].

1 = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3306467/

2 = https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...

In the paper, they state that they did daily measurements of chow and sugar drink intake. So the intake was mostly unregulated, but it was measured.
My bad, turns out I was completely wrong:

> There was no overall difference in total caloric intake (sugar plus chow) among the sucrose group and two HFCS groups.

Technically, I was right in that they didn't control overall intake, but they did prove that they didn't need to control overall intake so my alternative hypothesis was refuted in any case.