High Fructose Corn Syrup (good or bad)
 

OK, so my question is about Hight Fructose Corn Syrup. This is contained in many drinks, like ALL non-diet soft drinks, Snapple, many drinks.....I know that during the carb-up fruits are not optimum carbohdrate source caus' fructose is slowy digested and more likely to goto liver instead of repleninshing muscles. But what about HFCS??? I am avoiding this caus of that, but are these things really similar to fructose?

ALso, GAtorade has something that is like Sucrose-Fructose syrup as an ingrediant. What the h~ll is that? So should I avoid this too??

Basically my point is, I want to have good carb-up's, but seeing as how damn boring the week is, there is no way in hell that I will get all my calories from Sweet Tarts and Smarties!!!! So I want to be 'good' but how bad are these things?

PS I already eat breakfast cereal (I noticed that Kellogs 'Magiks' ceral, or something like that has the highest sugar content per carbohydrate content, it is the one with Mickey Mouse in a blue magician robe with magical stars everywhere) Also Low Fat Pop tarts, I get frozen yogurt at TCBY (98% fat free of course) I also throw back some Starbucks Frapuccionos, and some other foods. And the Entimans fat free things, those are golden.

Anything containing fructose is not a good choice. High fructose corn syrup is probably at the top of the list. Table sugar is usually sucrose, which is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose - not a good idea either.

I have, however, seen a paper showing that sucrose produced a very high rate of glycogen deposition in the muscles, a bit higher than pure glucose even. Fructose was only 50% as good. That study did not look at replenishing of glycogen deposits in the liver at all though. The makers of the many sports drinks will tell you that reglycogenating the liver is a good thing; they are partially right when talking about endurance sports - when glycogen in the liver keeps blood glucose steady. Of course they aren't concerned with ketogenic diets.

It is my understanding that fructose likes to live in the liver and will stay there for a few days. Therefore, if you are carbing up on it, you can expect to take longer to get into ketosis. This is coming from the BodyRX book, by Dr. Scott Connolly of MetRX. (He thinks fructose is the Great Satan, btw, esp HFCS) If you want exact quotes, let me know and I'll dig em up for you.

Cheers,

Friday

OK, I see, so sports drinks to the opposite of we want, we don't want to have full liver, where I guess other athletes like competing football players or olympic athlete would need this. So avoid gatorade and snapple.


BTW With all this talk of Coconut Oilk going around, does anyone use MCT Oil (like Keto Butter or Keto Oil)? This supposed to have all the good qualities of coconut oil without the negative parts.

Heres a little zinger for you.

Fructose is beneficial in the fact that it will replenish liver glycogen then spill over to your fat cells, thereby raising leptin levels and making it a lot easier to lose fat the next week.

I still limit fructose however. Avoid all the HFCS crap, but i do cut an apple up into my oatmeal and i do have a few peaches during my carb-up.

What's so beneficial about that? The downsides of fructose metabolism far outweigh the marginal upsides of leptin increase. There are other ways to increase leptin anyway.

The deal with fructose is this: it cannot enter the metabolic pathway like glucose does (glycolysis if you want to look it up) because it has slightly different chemical structure. For similar reasons it does not cause anywhere as much insulin release (this was why it used to be recommended to diabetics before it was realized that this was ill-interpreted science). Therefore, the liver grabs it and starts converting it to the intermediates of glycolysis so that it enters that pathway later. This obviously takes place in the liver, so this is where the produced energy will be used to synthesize glycogen and/or fat. Another something is that the conversion of fructose consumes energy first and then gives it back later - much slower than it is consumed initially. Plus there's an enzyme deficiency (aldolase B) that's rather common, which slows this down even further. In other words, it acts like an energy sink and throws the metabolic balance out of wack a little bit.

I'm kindda split on the whole fructose issue. I do take limited amounts of fructose during my carb-up and it doesn't seem to affect my fat loss at all. I don't think its the leptin factor at work as i get very little fructose. You are correct however that Leptin can be raised using other methods, like insane overfeeding, something close 3000-4000cals in ~5 hours for a 165# person, but i still enjoy fruit and oatmeal with apples and cinnamon is good.

I wasn't telling everybody on here to start eating HFCS or anything, but just offering a not-so-well-known fact. Don't want to start a debate as i still do believe that fructose isn't the greatest sugar around, but i don't know why we should avoid it like the plague. I doubt minute amounts will affect fat loss.

I don't think that fructose should be avoided like the plague either. That's just another version of labeling something as evil - the mainstream has labeled fat evil, the Atkins camp labeled sugar as evil, the vegetarians say that eating animals is evil, and the list goes on. Each of them is right to a degree but not entirely. I'm of the opinion that humans have been designed to eat just about everything, it's overeating that we have problems with.

Speaking of overeating, I think that on the weekends I practice what you call "insane overeating" - this weekend I put away about 16000 calories. This morning's weight was 191, up 7 from Saturday's 184. I don't do this for shock value nor is leptin anywhere on my mind when I eat like this - by experimentation I've determined that this (circa 2000 g) is the amount of carbs I need to reload well enough to go through the following week.

Wow, 16000 huh? Thats an insane number i have trouble putting away about 500g of carbs + about 160g of protein or so + small amount of fat. That comes out to be a little more that 2600cals. My carb-up is only about 16 hours or so, as i don't eat through the night.

May i ask how you manage to eat so much during the weekend? I have been experimenting with various calorie dense foods in hopes of packing in more carbs but it's still difficult. This saturday it was about 2lbs of vermicelli pasta, 2 cups oatmeal a visit to a steak house on friday night and a visit to an all you can eat sushi place on saturday night.

P.S. I don't really count carbs on my carb-up. I just eat as much as i can, because i know that i will not spill over on such a short carb up, even though if i spill i won't care as i will have raised leptin ;)

Zeus is gonna slap me for mentioning this again...

My weekend menu consists of smarties, protein shakes, and peanut butter (unsalted organic) or peanuts (unsalted). I've found myself to have lousy insulin sensitivity and I seem to have an allergy to gluten (i.e., no wheat products), so I have to be really careful about what kind of carbs I eat. Smarties are just about pure glucose (dextrose is another name for glucose), so they work very well. It's a pretty boring menu to eat this weekend in - weekend out, but I've been doing it for a number of months and gotten used to it. I don't get up in the middle of the night on purpose but if I happen to be up for some reason, I eat anyway. My carbup lasts only about 16 hours as well - from noon Saturday to 5-6 pm Sunday.

I have been hearing a lot about smarties and sweet tarts lately, i guess that a visit to my local costco warranted. One more question, do you just eat continuously or do you plan out your meals? Like every 2 hours or so? I try to eat as often as i can. My saturday is spent sleeping waking up every 2 hours to eat, until about 9pm then it's time to go out. If i'm not sleeping all day, i just eat, then rest for as long as it takes for my stomach to stop hurting then eat again.

I don't really plan them other than making sure that if I'm going out or whatever, I won't be stuck with an upset stomach. I'm not claiming to be perfect - when I get back from the depletion on Saturday (usually by noon), the first meal invariably ends up being something like two protein shakes and a 1-lb bag of smarties (I get them from Walgreens). That doesn't necessarily make me sleepy, in fact I get kind of a sugar rush, but it usually does upset my stomach a little, I figure it's from not having the carbs for 5 days. From then on I just keep a bowl filled with them and dip in there whenever I feel like it.

Cool man, I always try and learn how other people do things, this week's carb up will be ala west_on_46, lol. I'll see how the smarties and protein shakes work for me.

Holy cow. 16000 calories in 16 hours?!?!?! You do the math on this one, is this possible? I honestly can't see how you could eat this much food so quickly. I also read TD saying that you should space out this, ie: the time period does matter, not just the amount of raw calories you eat.

-Heh, sounds like fun. I suppose I'll have to try it like that sometime too... I can feel my throat burning just thinking about it.