Fructose - Worldwide Health Threat?

Fructose came to my attention in 2001... I wasn’t looking for it... It found me in Chapter’s, ( a Canadian chain of bookstores) - as I perused a new British magazine called Focus in search of information on enriched environments and the young plastic mind..... Strangely prophetic considering the sweetener’s prominence in our food supply today and its detrimental impact on our health...

The colourful and detailed pictorial, in that 2001 issue of Focus, of the human body and the journey fructose took when it was ingested and digested by the body, could not be ignored.... According to British scientists, fructose, sweeter than sugar and cheaper, too, went straight to the liver and was stored as fat... Hmm, I wondered. ..  I am neither a doctor nor  a scientist but this could not be a good thing...The revelations were startling....That knowledge became a pivotal moment in our family’s health history, influencing every food buying decision we have made since...And that was just the beginning!..

Fructose is a fruit sugar found in fruit, its natural habitat, surrounded by fibre and a host of other good things that the body recognizes and uses for health... The sad reality is that the body does not know what to do with this manufactured form of fructose - as it is ‘out of costume’, so to speak. It is manufactured from genetically-modified-(?) (GMO) corn on a grand scale....Fructose is now a foreign substance which the body does not recognize or know how to handle and whose continuous entry into our bodies via the processed foods we eat makes it a real health hazard...... Does this give rise to the illness called fatty liver or cirrhosis of the liver?

As a food service supervisor in my late teens and early twenties, I saw firsthand the importance of food in the lives of the sick.... My position at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, now one of the top cancer treatment centers in the world, helped to dispel any naivety I might have had, then, about the role of food in our daily lives...Food is both a comfort and a cure for what ails us!!

Fructose, it seems, is found in nearly every imaginable processed food product on the market today...Sadly, it is front and center in the drinks of choice: soda pop and fruit cocktails..... The world health crisis says it all... Diabetes, obesity and other health problems can probably trace their origins back to the unknowing, continuous ingestion of sugar in excessive amounts in all of its many sinister forms....Do sausages really need fructose/sugar?...Does the array of cake, cookie, muffin mixes  on the market require an array of sugars and why so much?...Why does tomato sauce contain  fructose/sugar?...Bread crumbs is an innocuous product, generally, until you look at the ingredient list of some... It is downright frightening! ... (Make your own)...  According to scientists another problem with fructose is its ability to turn on, not off, our appetite or hunger hormone...Fructose is not the only culprit, sadly... The trail of additives is closely linked to us, the naive public, as we play Russian Roulette with our health....When did we give food companies permission to alter the formula/recipe and jeopardize our wellbeing?...  When did that happen?....  It seems it all started in the 70’s when food companies realized the potential of enlisting the help of our taste buds -24 hours a day- to accommodate their bottom line and create an incessantly hungry populace...Let us realize that the best way to halt our early demise is to not allow our bodies to be entombed within the complex fructose/ sugar laboratory... We are the authors of our own misfortune when we do not cook for ourselves and  allow "others" to do so- with, sometimes, insidious repercussions.