Too much fructose can be dangerous and fattening

We live in an Age of Fructose. The average American ingests an amount of fructose per day that is wildly beyond what humans have eaten for thousands of years. This is due to the addition of artificially-produced sweeteners to just about anything you can imagine; there are "sweetened" forms of cereals to milk to vitamin pills. There is even sweetened toothpaste. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the notorious sweetener of choice, a cheap artificial byproduct of one of our nationally-subsidized staple crops, corn.

Many health problems are related to excessive fructose:

-Excess fructose has been linked to insulin resistance, i.e. your cells stop listening to insulin and do not receive nutrients in your blood stream even when they are present. Result: those nutrients end up being stored as fat rather than used.

-Excess fructose casues glycation. Like the caramel on Cracker Jacks, AGEs (Advanced Glycation End Products) are burned excess sugars that form when blood sugar is too high, particularly from fructose. These sticky AGE molecules are now being found by doctors to be a culprit in a huge variety of chronic diseases like diabetes, heart diesease, and alzheimers.

-Excess fructose causes gout. It causes high uric acid levels, which is all gout is.

-Worsens diabetes. Fructose was once (and still is by some) touted as the best sguar for diabetics. Turns out to be the worst. Agave syrup, marketed to diabetics, is straight fructose. It is marketed as a health product due to its low glycemic index (GI), but this belies the other effects, especially glycation, which is elevated for diabetics.

For some people, 25 grams a day is about as high as you want to go. If you drink a couple sodas a day, you just quadrupled that limit. One high-fructose corn syrup drink has a wildly unnatural amount of fructose. If you get stuck and need a sugar hit, buy a can of soda and dump half of it out before you start drinking.

For others, like me, who do not process fructose well, cutting out fructose altogether is a good idea. You have to get your carbs frmo other sources, there are plenty from fibrous carbs like legumes to quality starches like quinoa, and also milk if you can tolerate lactose. Fructose is one of many types of sugar which all carry different properties. It is very sweet compared to other sugars like glucose, lactose, maltose, etc. Besides straight fructose, which is actually found in relatively small amounts in fruits, it is also one of the byproducts of sucrose which includes common sugars like table sugar. When you eat white sugar, it breaks down into one glucose and one fructose molecule, so, to be clear, when a package says "sugar" half of it will turn into fructose.