Comments on: ‘Fructose: toxic or misjudged?’

By: Bill Shrapnel

Bill Shrapnel — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 20:42:44 +0000

Hi Jenna. Agree that keeping energy intake in balance is important but isn’t ‘eat less sugar’ a rather blunt instrument for achieving that? If I follow that advice I could remove nutrient-poor foods from my diet (confectionery, soft drinks) or I could remove nutrient-rich foods from my diet (flavoured milk, fruity yoghurts, breakfast cereals). So just focussing on sugar could improve or worsen overall dietary quality.
A focus on ‘sugar is bad’ has a corollary – starch must be good. But this isn’t true. There doesn’t seem to be any adverse effect on cardiometabolic health by choosing sugar over starch, or vice versa. And some starchy foods are nutrient-poor.
All this leads me to suggest that there is little point in thinking in terms of sugar and starch. It’s much better to assess carbohydrate-rich foods on the basis of their nutrient density (including fibre as a nutrient). Regards, Bill

By: Kate

Kate — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 06:09:02 +0000

Sucrose making up 25% of recommended daily energy intake, not recommended daily micronutrient intake. I’d imagine that the sucrose would still come under carbohydrate energy intake, which then leave the other 75% of energy to be made up from carbs, fat and/or protein. And as it has been mentioned in this article, 25% of energy from sucrose does not mean that the energy was nutrient deficient…..(although as you say doesn’t mean it will be nutrient dense either).

By: Jenna

Jenna — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 03:43:26 +0000

“if substituting refined sugar for refined starch in diets up to the quite high level of 25% of energy has no significant health effects why do our nutrition authorities continue to use sugar or added sugar as a criterion for assessing the nutritional quality of foods and diets?”
I would think it’s because most people aren’t sitting down calculating the percentage of their diet and limiting their total sugar to 25%, nor their total energy intake vs their output. In my mind it’s part of a bigger picture to keep total energy and sugar intake at a reasonable amount. Additionally, if you’re eating 25% sucrose than how are you getting everything else in that you need to? Would be pretty hard jamming all your other RDI’s into 75% of the diet and still maintaining one’s healthy weight.