Blah, I got embroiled in the whole "should obesity be classified by the US government as a disease" debate. Everytime I go back to the MH board, I find it's more and more of a re-hash of the same tired topics. Which is why I'm happy as all hell to have come to this board =).
As far as fructose metabolism goes, fructose has its own metabolic pathway to enter into the glycolytic cycle. Nothing terribly exciting there. There's actually a study in the Journal of Nutrition (I haven't read it yet) that suggests that taking a small amount of fructose 30-60 minutes before the consumption of high glycemic, starchy foods (Coke is not a starchy food. The researchers looked at a potato as the high glycemic, starchy food) may actually decrease post-meal glycemic responses (i.e. insulin spikes).
Fructose occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables as well, so it's not like we haven't been eating fructose all this time anyways.
The main issue is that since high fructose corn syrup is so cheap, it has made the production of sweet, high glycemic index foods similarly cheap, and thus these foods are in higher availability than they ever have been (both in terms of physical availability and in terms of economic availability). Higher availability is likely a product of demand (no one would produce more HFCS products if the market for HFCS products was static) and since there's demand, the supply increases as far as the market will bear (the ceiling of which doesn't seem to have been hit yet). Either way, whether HFCS is used as the sweetener or table sugar (which has different physical properties), is kinda moot (I've been using the word "moot" a lot lately, haven't I?), since it's the overconsumption that is the root cause of the thses HFCS/sugar problems.
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