fruit Almost all foods contain natural fructose sugar
Of all the questions we answer on a daily basis, the one we hear most often is, “Why do so many of Natural Ovens’ products contain fructose?” Simply put, most of the foods you consume were not designed for your optimal benefit, such as being alert and focused, while feeling full with the fewest calories possible. By contrast, all of Natural Ovens’ products have been scientifically designed with a detailed knowledge of nutritional biochemistry and metabolism to provide the best possible nutrition for attaining specific human goals.
The nutritional specifications are rationally planned for your benefit, using information at the molecular level about how the human body uses nutrients to accomplish tasks. If you have a sweet tooth, you’ll appreciate that almost all of our foods contain fructose, a natural fruit sugar that burns slowly in your body to provide long-lasting energy, unlike ordinary table sugar. You’d rather just eat an orange? When you consider that the sugar content of an orange is only about 30% fructose, along with 50% sucrose (ordinary table sugar) and 20% glucose (grape sugar), it’s clear that this combination makes for a good natural antifreeze for the orange, but it’s a poor carbohydrate system when you desire long- lasting energy and carbohydrate hunger control.
White sugar and the glycemic index
Ordinary table sugar (cane or beet sugar, sucrose) and grape sugar (glucose) are absorbed from your digestive tract relatively quickly, causing your pancreas to release a lot of insulin, the natural hormone required to metabolize the sudden big surge in your blood sugar levels. The average amount that your blood sugar rises after you eat a given amount of a particular carbohydrate is called that carbohydrate’s glycemic index.
Fructose sugar and the glycemic index
The natural fruit sugar fructose has one of the lowest glycemic indexes of any food – with a rating of only 20, compared to 31 for skim milk, 59 for sucrose (ordinary table sugar), and 98 for an equal weight of mashed potatoes. This means that 1 ounce of fructose raises your blood sugar only about 1/3 as much as an ounce of sucrose, and it releases only about 1/3 as much insulin. And a mashed potato raises your blood sugar almost 5 times higher than a comparable amount of fructose! High glycemic index carbohydrates can cause major problems for your body’s fat control program.
Fructose sugar and elevated insulin
First, your elevated insulin level makes the sugar that you don’t promptly burn enter your fat storage cells where it is converted to stored body fat. Your genes are preparing you to survive a famine, but in a country with plenty of food this famine life insurance can make you fat. Second, all that insulin can make so much sugar leave your blood stream that you become hypoglycemic two or three hours later (your body functions are not up to par, and you will crave more carbohydrates, and you may feel irritable. If the carbohydrates that you then eat release another big dose of insulin, the same vicious cycle repeats itself again and again every few hours. This is precisely what happens to cattle when they are fattened in a feedlot. In fact, doses of insulin can make experimental animals hyperphagic (eat abnormally large amounts of food), and obese.
Some scientists have even called insulin a “hunger hormone.” Substituting low glycemic index carbohydrates, especially when you’re choosing snacks, can improve your blood sugar regulation, reduce your insulin release, aid your weight loss program, and keep going stronger, longer.
Natural Ovens Bakery draws upon current nutritional research and selects from a wide range of media reports to present timely, informative articles. This information echoes our practice, philosophy and concern that Americans need to be well informed to make intelligent choices.
