The article says that sugar based drinks are far worse for your health than diet versions.
What kind of sugar? High fructose corn syrup or sugar?
HFCS is metabolized in the liver making it far more damaging to the body. And soda that uses real sugar typically has a lower sugar content. Soda with real sugar also imparts a feeling of fullness, typically resulting in people drinking less.
I am going to need a source that HFCS is worse than sucrose for your liver.
People hear “high fructose” in High Fructose Corn Syrup and assume it’s in comparison to other sugars, it is not. High Fructose corn syrup is a name to differentiate it from regular corn syrup, which is almost entirely glucose.
Let’s look at the real differences between HFCS and sucrose or table sugar. Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. HFCS is usually 55% fructose in beverages and 42% in most other HCFS sweetened products. This means that typically the High Fructose corn syrup has less fructose than regular sugar.
You could focus on beverages, but 5% isn’t a huge difference, and if your going to talk about the dangers of sugary beverages it’s always important to remind people that fruit juice has A LOT of fructose (go figure).
Sugar itself is the problem, monitor intake. HCFS is only an issue because the price drove down the cost of sweetening foods to everyone’s detriment.
(Here’s a study on the liver effects.)[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6549781/]
It doesn’t specifically say that fructose has a worse effect on the liver than sucrose, but it does say that fructose is 2x sweeter than glucose, which makes it more addicting, which causes you to drink more because you crave it. So I went looking up sweetness scales and fructose is also sweeter than sucrose (which is still sweeter than glucose), sometimes by a significant margin.
So if both are bad on the liver, fructose could possibly be worse because of a higher level of addiction due to sweetness level, which causes you to consume more than you might with just sucrose.
