[jacques_chester]

Net caloric balance is still the best long term predictor of average body mass, regardless of dietary macronutrient composition.

http://examine.com/faq/what-should-i-eat-for-weight-loss.htm...

In turn, obesity is a strong predictor of many diseases, regardless of other factors.

In individual cases unobservable "noise" can affect the rate of gain or loss vs the estimated rate given by subtracting an estimate (calories gleaned from an activities database) from another estimate (calories written on the side of the food packet).

But when you look at population BMI vs population calorie intake, it looks suspiciously like a perfect correlation:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/calories-st...

Which is what we would expect from a basic acceptance of freshman physics. Energy and matter are conserved. No exceptions.

Singling out fructose as some kind of super-baddy doesn't work, for the simple reason that the population BMI-calories correlation appears in countries outside the USA. Only the USA has corn politics and only the USA has HFCS in the food supply in any abundance. Yet the rest of the developed world is getting fat on the same trajectory as the USA has.

[hristov]

The problem with refined fructose is that it contributes to you eating more because the liver cannot process it properly and does not send the "i am full" signals to the brain. Thus, it is in fact the reason why people have higher net caloric intake.

US style food is being exported all over the world. Sodas are sold all over the world. Obesity around the world is generally correlated to the level at which US style food culture is adopted.

[spikels]

It seems to always be acceptable to blame the US for any problem but as pointed out in the article neither sugar cane, refined sugar nor high-fructose corn syrup originated in the US. And almost every "US style food" originated somewhere else. So should we blame Italy, France, China and Mexico too?

I would say the US may be primarily responsible for the technology (agricultural, supply chain, financing, etc) that made food potentially affordable to everyone. An unfortunate consequence of having enough food to eat is being able to eat too much.

[autarch]

Did you read the article? It argues directly against your claim that fructose is the primary culprit for obesity.

[Fargren]

Fortunately, in most of the world sodas use sugar instead of syrup. So it's not as bad as it could be.

[throwit1979]

Except it takes about 5 seconds for sucrase in your small intestine to hydrolyze sugar into exactly the same substances present in HFCS. So it doesn't matter. At all.

[pyre]

Most HFCS in use today is a mixture of 45% glucose / 55% fructose. Sucrose is 1 glucose molecule and 1 fructose molecule bonded together. If fructose is really the 'bad' thing here, then HFCS has more of it.

[donaldc]

It can be even worse than that. Studies have found some HFCS to contain as much as 65% fructose.

[stevep98]

If you want to scrutinize american sodas, I think you have to look at the portion size and culture of free refills rather than the sugar type.

I don't know of anywhere else in the world that has serving sizes as big as the US. And very few places outside the US offer free refills.

[yen223]

Isn't syrup just water with sugar? How is that worse?

[ekianjo]

He's referring to fructose syrup. To replace sugar, which is more expensive.

[jacques_chester]

Only the USA has an unusually high supply of fructose.

Everyone else uses cane sugar because it's cheaper.

People are getting fat because they like the taste of dense foods and those foods are cheaper and more available than ever before in history.

[hristov]

Did you read the article? Cane sugar is sucrose. The sucrose molecule gets broken up into a fructose and glucose molecule by the gut. Thus, cane sugar is for all intents and purposes 50% fructose. This is very similar to HFCS, which is 55% fructose.

[jacques_chester]

I'm aware of that; it's the other reason why the HFCS hypothesis is broken. But it's much easier to draw the international comparisons.

[nitrogen]

The correlation you want isn't BMI<->calories, it's food type<->calories. The question to be answered is whether some types of food make it easier or harder to maintain a caloric balance.

[jacques_chester]

Which is a question of satiety. The tl;dr is: eat protein and stop drinking sugary liquids.

[nitrogen]

It's not just satiety, there's also the fact that fiber prevents absorption of a percentage of ingested food, and possibly other effects on appetite and digestive efficiency such as gut bacteria.

[jacques_chester]

Food labels do account for all the known digestive factors, but as I noted, they're estimates. Monitoring your diet and watching the result is still the best method of weight control.

[acchow]

Unless the paper has proper multivariate analysis, it should rightly by ignored.