Interesting study.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Fructose fosters fat creation
UC mouse study looks at soda-pop sweetener
By Tim Bonfield
Enquirer staff writer
Few people would be surprised to learn that drinking a lot of soda pop can make a person gain weight.
But a study of mice issued Friday indicates that fructose - a corn-based sweetener commonly used in soda - does more than just add calories to a diet. It may play a role in making the body create fat.
The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Cincinnati, and co-authored by researchers in Germany and California. It was published in the July issue of Obesity Research, a specialty medical journal.
Researchers allowed mice to freely consume water, fructose-sweetened water or fructose-sweetened soft drinks. The mice that drank the fructose-sweetened drinks tended to eat less solid food, so the overall calorie consumption was not widely different among the groups. Still, the mice that consumed fructose wound up with as much as 90 percent more body fat than the water-only drinkers.
This means that fructose appears to affect metabolic rate in a way that favors fat storage, said study author Dr. Matthias Tschöp, a member of the Obesity Research Center at UC’s Genome Research Institute.
“Our study shows how fat mass increases as a direct consequence of soft-drink consumption,” said Tschöp.
“We were surprised to see that mice actually ate less when exposed to fructose-sweetened beverages,” said Tschöp. “… Nevertheless, they gained significantly more body fat within a few weeks.”
The mice study supports a previous study led by Dr. Peter Havel, of the University of California at Davis, that reported that human weight-regulating hormones do not respond to fructose as they do to other carbohydrates, such as glucose (table sugar).
Researchers now believe that the liver metabolizes fructose differently, leading to higher body fat.
They say that further studies in humans are needed to determine how much of the nation’s growing obesity problem can be linked to high-fructose corn syrup in soft drinks.