Fructose Used In The Food Industry Linked To Liver Disease

Unknown to many, fructose is not just used extensively in the processed foods industry but also in the common foods found in bakeries, dessert shops, restaurants and even street foods. Fructose contrary to common thinking, it not just used for its sweeting properties rather it is used as a food enhancer to improve the properties of foods. Hence fructose can be found in all your various sauces at your favourite salad bar, Japanese or Suki restaurant and even in the street food vendors versions of satay sauce or the  sweet chilli sauces for fried foods. It is used extensively in freshly baked foods like breads, snacks and cookies especially at various hypermarts and bakeries. It is used extensively in various bottled and canned drinks as well as juices. It is even added to alcoholic beverages these days including certain beers. One of the world largest coffee chains uses it in every menu item, just ask the local baristas. Fructose is often used in the form of processed corn syrup.  
Fructose already had a bad reputation in the past has having been linked to various ailments and diseases but now researchers have found that even moderate consumption of fructose over a long period of time can be disastrous to one’s health. It is found that fructose contributes to the development of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) which often is not easy to detect till in the latent stages which are often fatal.
 
Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center have found that fructose in the diet inhibit the liver's ability to properly metabolize fat. This effect is specific to fructose. Indeed, equally high levels of glucose in the diet actually improve the fat-burning function of the liver. This explains why high dietary fructose has more negative health impacts than glucose does, even though they have the same caloric content.
 
Dr  C. Ronald Kahn, Chief Academic Officer at Joslin and the Mary K. Iacocca and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author on the study published in Cell Metabolism commented in an interview with Thailand Medical News, "This is one of a series of studies that our team has been doing concerning what role fructose in the diet plays in terms of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Fructose makes the liver accumulate fat. It acts almost like adding more fat to the diet. This contrasts the effect of adding more glucose to the diet, which promotes the liver's ability to burn fat, and therefore actually makes for a healthier metabolism."
 
He further added,"The most important takeaway of this study is that fructose in the diet is bad. It's not bad because it's more calories, but because it has effects on liver metabolism to make it worse at burning fat. As a result, adding fructose to the diet makes the liver store more fat, and this is bad for the liver and bad for whole body metabolism. Surprisingly, when you switch the sugar in the diet from fructose to glucose, even though they're both equally caloric, the glucose doesn't have that effect. In fact, if anything, overall metabolism is somewhat better than if they just we re on plain high-fat diet. In this paper we wanted to figure out at a mechanistic level how this could be possible."
 
When conducting studies on animal models, the Joslin researchers compared effects on metabolism of six different diets: regular chow, chow with fructose, chow with glucose, a high-fat diet, a high-fat diet with fructose, and a high-fat diet with glucose.
 
The medical scientists analyzed different known markers of fatty liver to determine the effects of each diet. For example, they looked at levels of acylcarnitines in the liver's cells. Acylcarnitines are produced when the liver burns fats. High levels of these are a bad sign, since it means there is a lot of fat in the liver being burned. Acylcarnitines were highest in the animals on the high-fat plus fructose diet. They were lower in the high-fat plus glucose diet than in the plain high-fat diet, which reflected previous observational findings and indicated that glucose performed an assistive fat-burning action in these animals.
 
They also monitored the activity of a critical enzyme for fat-burning known as CPT1a. In the case of CPT1a, the higher the levels the better as they indicate that mitochondria are performing their fat-burning jobs correctly. However, in the high-fat plus fructose diet the researchers found that levels of CPT1a are low and their activity was very low, meaning mitochondria can't function properly. This led the researchers to investigate the mitochondria themselves.
 
According to Dr Kahn, "When mitochondria are healthy, they have this nice ovoid shape and crosshatching. In the high-fat plus fructose group, these mitochondria are fragmented and they're not able to burn fat as well as the healthy mitochondria. But looking at the high-fat diet plus glucose group, those mitochondria become more normal looking because they are burning fat normally."
These findings, combined with other markers they monitored, proved that both high-fat and high-fat plus fructose diets damages mitochondria and makes it easier for the liver to synthesize and store fat rather than burn it.
 
Dr. Kahn and colleagues plan believe that developing a drug which blocks fructose metabolism could prevent the negative actions of fructose and help prevent fatty liver disease and its adverse metabolic consequences, including impaired glucose tolerance and type 1 diabetes
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Study authors included Samir Softic, Jesse G. Meyer, Guo-Xiao Wang, Manoj K. Gupta, Thiago M. Batista, Hans P.M.M. Lauritzen, Shiho Fujisaka, Dolors Serra, Laura Herrero, Jennifer Willoughby, Kevin Fitzgerald, Olga Ilkayeva, Christopher B. Newgard, Bradford W. Gibson, Birgit Schilling, and David E. Cohen.This study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
 
Consumers are warned to do due diligence when shopping for foods and also eating out. Be more discerning in your choices and stay away from tempting items that can be disastrous to your health. Parents are also advised to monitor the dietary habits of their children and it is advisable to do regular screenings of your liver, not just due to your dietary intakes but also for  varied other  reasons as well.