Well... duh!

This was published yesterday. Just in case you have a "too long, didn't read" moment, here's the story in a nutshell.

Rats were fed normal diet, but some were given sugar (sucrose) in the drinking water, some given high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in their water. The HFCS group became obese, the sucrose group remained pretty much the same.

HFCS is used extensively in a lot of foods, mainly processed stuff, because it is very cheap to manufacture. A bit like hydrogenated vegetable fats, it creeps into the daily diet of a lot of people, from those who need a microwave meal because it's quick and easy, to those who stuff their faces with crap from McDonalds.

What most people fail to realise is that although the calorific content of the two sugar types is virtually identical, HFCS bypasses the satiety response completely. Ordinarily, sucrose (one molecule of glucose joined up to one of fructose) triggers a negative feedback response: the body senses the high-energy source and eventually does a Mr Creosote ("**** off, I'm full.") This is caused by the metabolism of glucose to glucose-1-phosphate and then to glucose-6 phosphate as part of the glycolysis pathway down to pyruvate.

Fructose misses out this step and joins the pathway further down - the same endpoint, but a different entry point. However, all the metabolic sensors for glycolysis are based at the glucose-6-phosphate step. What this means is that food containing glucose makes the brain and body realise that it's had enough to eat but fructose doesn't.

People who eat this processed junk basically don't realise that they've already eaten enough calories, and as such about an hour after stuffing their faces with a Big Mac they fancy a nice tasty snack. Probably Doritos or some other rubbish. Why? Because they don't actually feel full.

So: one of the many problems with fast food. The trouble is that it's so cheap: so many calories for so little money. Unfortunately buying food that doesn't contain HFCS and other such junk costs more, hence the problems with obesity in the Western world, and until the food lobbyists are rapped on the knuckles this problem is going to continue, much to the detriment of world health.

Which brings me on to a final point: congrats to Obama for getting the USA healthcare bill pushed through, but the wankers that voted against it do have a point: the USA cannot afford the increased cost to the nation simply because the big businesses are still pushing bad diets down the necks of the taxpayers. The fatter they get, the bigger the burden on the tax bill. Obama was right to get the bill pushed through, but needs to tackle the tobacco and food lobbies before any real benefit will ever be seen.