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From: berke@ucla-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.med,net.consumers
Subject: Sugar: The real scoop.
Message-ID: <8175@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 24-Dec-85 19:11:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ucla-cs.8175
Posted: Tue Dec 24 19:11:43 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 25-Dec-85 17:39:03 EST
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Reply-To: berke@ucla-cs.UUCP (Peter Berke)
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Summary: It's glucose.

After years of reading books such as "Sugar Blues" and having all sorts of
friends go hypog. or worse, and watching people eat honey instead of sugar, I
finally sat down with a friend of mine in a library to find out what if 
anything was wrong with sugar.

We found in some books that glucose, and I believe, galactose diffuse across
intestinal walls and so the only thing governing the rate is the concentration
of glucose in digestion, compared with that in the blood.  On the other hand,
the other simple sugars are carried across the boundaries ("active transport?")
by chemical substances, so the rate is limited by the quantity of these 
chemicals. 

Since sucrose is half glucose, we could undersand the problem of table sugar.
That is, sucrose is a compound of glucose, and I can't remember which other
simple sugar, and it is the glucose diffusing across boundaries that is 
the trouble.

Honey it turns out, is half pure glucose, not in compound form, so it's just
as "bad." That is, bad in terms of eating glucose.

As I recall, starches and other complex carbohydrates don't break down into
glucose.  So as far as we could figure, eating fructose (fruit sugar - now 
available in refined form) shouldn't have the "rush" and "blues" effects of
glucose-containing substances.

This is not a treatment for hypoglycemia!  I am not a doctor.  In fact, 
it took a nutritionist, and me, an avid "I know what I eat" nut for twenty
years, several books on nutrition, and medicine, to get this far.  Doctors and
biochemists poo-poo the bad effects of sugar (unless you are already diabetic
or hypoglycemic, and even then ...) and health-food proponents treat sugar
as though it were some part of a religious cult.

A biochemist friend of mine was the stimulus for this particular research in 
that he stated of sugars that "They're all interconvertible in the body
anyway.  This turns out to be incorrect, but it led to the transport theory.

If anybody can add to the previous discussion, either validating or denying 
facts, please let me know. (If you reply, I can summarize).  I would like
to give you references, but when we did this I was truly interested in my own
health, and not in expounding nutritional theories.  

Peter Berke