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R / subscribe so without further delay. Here's today's sneak peek of the ask me anything episode. Welcome to ask me anything episode number 18. Once again joined by my header research Bob Kaplan in today's episode. We talk exclusively about sugar and sugar substitutes. There have been a lot of questions posed about so many aspects of this questions that are follow-ups to the what is it about sugar? That's so
is sucrose worse than high fructose corn syrup those types of questions what about naturally occurring sugars so we sort of tackle a bunch of those questions and then the other half of the episode gets into all the substitutes for sugar which are largely broken down into three categories the non-nutritive versions those are things like aspartame and Stevia which again you could further subdivide is naturally occurring versus synthetic the alcohol sugars and then actual sugars that are not sugar such as Ali loss and that's a question
has come up specifically so I think that anyone who's interested in a lelo's which I've talked about in the past will find this episode very interesting so without further delay I hope you enjoy am a number 18
hey Peter
how you doing doing awesome man
unfortunately I didn't get a name to put up was going to put on Cleon Das glaucous as my username for this one for this am a keeping with the threat of 80s goalies
That one stumps me man
backup goaltender for the Boston Bruins. I want to say mid-80s 84 86, you might have played double digit games. I think he's from Boston went to Boston University remember and backed up either both these people Pete Peters and Doug Keynes course is yeah prior to the bill Ranford and Andy Moog days the sloppy seconds from the Edmonton Oilers. Well,
we've got a pretty good one here for today Bob. We're going to talk about sugar and probably do so in a way.
That I'm guessing most people aren't prepared for the depth. We're going to go into on both sugar and artificial sweeteners because we have just been getting so many questions on this topic that I think we decided collectively don't scatter this information to broadly and do it in sort of a half-baked way. Like let's put together kind of the all-singing all-dancing place for it to exist both in audio form and also with show notes in the team's been working pretty hard on assembling this so where do
To start this discussion around artificial sweeteners sugars. What do you thinks the best way into
this? Probably talk about sugar in general. I think a lot of the questions were one was on a lilo's and particular but really in some of them are on safety are these non-nutritive sweeteners safe are all sweeteners. Basically the same are they more or less are they all created equal so it's probably makes sense to back up and talk about sugar and what that term actually means.
Yeah, and we actually had a Sunday email that kind of covered this topic because
Because as we were putting our thoughts together for this am a we realized that we should also at least put some of those together in the Sunday email. So yeah, let's take this step back and talk about sugar and this is a as you know, Bob you've known me for I don't know 10 years. This is a sore spot for
me. I hate inaccurate
nomenclature. It really really grinds my gears. So unfortunately the word sugar just upsets me.
It gives me a little bit of chest pain tons of consternation. I don't like it. I don't like talking about it. But I'm going to explain why that's the case. The reason I'm frustrated by this terminology is it means a lot of different things in all of those things can be true glucose is a sugar called lactose is a sugar fructose is a sugar sucrose is a sugar as you mentioned Al elos is a sugar.
Now to lump all of those things in one category is unhelpful. So what I instead want to do is get folks to sort of think about these things through the lens of molecules and less through their names.
In other words.
It's sort of like if you were trying to evaluate a hockey team, it wouldn't be very helpful if you only thought of them as hey, that's Bob. That's Peter. That's
Richard that's Nick it would be more helpful if you could think that's a goalie. He's pretty good. He sort of does this he does that that's a defenseman he plays this way he shoots this way. My other words think of them through their basic attributes and not through the most generic nomenclature of their existence. Okay. So let's start with the two monomers that we care most about glucose and fructose. So what do I mean by monomers? So monomers
means these things form the simplest building blocks of carbohydrates now both glucose and fructose actually have the same chemical formula, which is kind of interesting isn't it? In other words, they have the same number of carbons the same number of hydrogen's and the same number of oxygens. So if you looked at them in their chemical formula, they would both be C6 six carbons H 12 12
Oh
six six oxygens. They're obviously not the same or we give them the same name glucose is arranged in a six carbon ring. Whereas fructose is arranged in a five-carbon ring and one of those carbons hangs outside the balance so it sticks outside the ring and it turns out that makes all the difference in the world that to me is one of just the coolest things about biology and biochemistry specifically is even the minor has tweaked can have a profound difference.
It's now I can to go into this in huge detail today. But Bob how many podcasts do we have where we've touched on the difference between glucose and
fructose Rob lustig I think talked about it Rick Johnson is another one where we talked about glucose versus fructose.
Yeah. Those would be the two best right? I think Rob lustig and Rick Johnson do an exceptional job explaining why all things equal if you just have humans or mice or dogs or camels and force.
Had them glucose or fructose to their heart's content, even though they're the same chemical formula and very similar chemical structure. They would have dramatically different metabolic effects.
Now, we rarely
consume fructose by itself. We often consumed glucose by itself in the sense that when starches are broken down they often end up in the form of glucose. So if you're eating a bowl of rice or consuming pasta,
Te that will often break down from more complex starches into simple monomers of glucose. But usually when you're consuming things that are sweet IE things that contain fructose they come with a dose of glucose as well. So if you're eating an apple or consuming honey, eating a mango you're getting
some balance
of glucose and fructose in that fruit and as a general rule the sweeter it is the more fructose it.
Okay is glucose sugar yes is fructose of sugar. Yes. Are they the same not even close when people use the word sugar. I think the first thing that jumps to mind is probably something that is technically referred to as sucrose sucrose is what happens when you take one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose and put them together covalently.
So that means they are bonded together and you now have What's called the disaccharide and as the name suggests that's what happens when you take two monosaccharides and merge them and you get this disaccharide the easiest example of where sucrose exists is refined sugar. So when you look at white granulated sweet sugar that is exactly what sucrose is and the easiest places that we get that are basically refining it out of things like
Beans and beets and things like that and I remember as a kid actually when we would go back and visit my grandparents guys that work in the field were picking canes and I remember sucking on those canes like there was no tomorrow and I just couldn't believe how good they taste it and the reason they tasted so damn good was I was just mainlining sucrose out of these very fibrous canes. I still remember this like it was like chewing on a stick you can extract the sucrose out of that just as you can with beets and that's how we
Make sucrose. I don't know the numbers Bob. You might do you have a sense of what the relative distribution of u.s. Consumption of sucrose versus high fructose corn syrup is
not off the top of my head
directionally. Is it more high fructose corn syrup?
Yeah, I think it's like it's ebbed and flowed because I think if you go through the whole history, but back in the Nixon era, I think lustick talked about this quite a bit we had sugar and then we introduced high fructose corn syrup and fructose the name fructose.
From fruit. So it's a fruit sugar. So we all thought that fructose is almost like a health food and I think actually for diabetics as well. I remember this that things like honey people would say, oh it's okay for diabetics because we'll probably get into this that fructose doesn't stimulate insulin secretion the way that glucose does high fructose corn syrup. It's a four letter acronym but it's like a four-letter word now, but for a time we almost started as a health food consumption skyrocketed, and now I think it's relevant probably to this conversation as well that
There's been a turn towards almost back to quote-unquote Natural sugars, which gets into the argument to you'll hear it often. The people will say probably this is a question. We'll get to you're better off having the Coke versus The Diet Coke because the diet coke is full of chemicals in the coke contains sugar and that's something that we can naturally handle. We've got our blood sugar. So again, you talk about terminology and how that gets confused. But I think there was a really big spike in high fructose corn syrup. And now I think that there's been like a
It's almost supply and demand market-driven perhaps that people if they had the choice between high fructose corn syrup and sugar. I think they now think that sugar is quote unquote healthier less deleterious and high fructose corn syrup.
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the going back to the early 70s because it is kind of an interesting story which goes back to basically it was either an embargo or some tariffs or something like that on sugar and there was this new
E I think being developed in Japan that could effectively make something almost like sucrose but in a solution, so instead of taking one to one glucose fructose and fusing these things in this disaccharide, you could say hey look why not just take a solution of glucose a solution of fructose. It was not 50/50. It was 45 55 in favor of fructose. So that made it a little sweeter and basically you could produce this in unlimited quantities.
Them solved and you make a very good point which was there was a belief and frankly, they're probably still is a belief that fructose is better for someone with diabetes because you don't have to chase it with insulin, of course notwithstanding the fact that fructose does so much for insulin resistance were not going to get into that and as much detail now because we'll get into it a bit more later. And of course, it's been covered exquisitely and beautifully by both Rob and Rick and I think you're absolutely right that
Probably into the early 2000s high fructose corn syrup was the dominant sweetener added to foods and there's been a little bit of a revolt and of course the irony of it. It's been back to things that are more natural quote-unquote. It's like, oh don't give me your high fructose corn syrup. I'm going to eat my dried mangoes and my dates and even sucrose is probably better. So let's move on to that point. There's another distinction that most people have probably noticed.
When they look at food labels, which is sugars and added sugars a properly adherent food label will list both it will say carbohydrates fiber grams sugar grams and beneath that added sugar grams. So what do all of those numbers mean? Thank you for listening to today's sneak peek. Am a episode of the drive. If you're interested in hearing the complete version of this am a you'll want to become a member. We created the membership program.
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