Fructose makes you crave calories - study

  • Breaking
  • 04/05/2015

Consuming food sweetened with fructose makes people hungrier and more likely to go on to eat high-calorie treats, US researchers have found.

It also appears to leaves them less satiated, suggesting fructose's role in the obesity epidemic goes beyond its high calorie content.

Fructose, often derived from corn, is widely used to sweeten drinks in the US because of its low cost and ease of storage and transportation, compared to normal sugar. Its use is less common in the rest of the world.

Researchers at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles gave 24 people drinks sweetened with fructose one day and glucose the next, each time showing them images of high-calorie food and measuring their brain responses with an MRI machine.

They found greater activity in each participant's orbitofrontal and visual cortices after they had ingested the fructose-sweetened drinks. The participants also reported feeling hungrier after the fructose drinks than those sweetened with glucose.

"When presented with a choice between delayed monetary rewards or immediate high-calorie food rewards, participants displayed greater willingness to give up monetary rewards for food rewards after ingesting fructose than after ingesting glucose," the team said in a statement.

The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest drinking fructose-sweetened drinks could contribute to weight gain over and above the energy in the drink itself, by weakening consumers' will to resist consuming other high-calorie products.

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source: newshub archive