This is your brain on sugar -- for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.
After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.
It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of US children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.
All sugars are not equal - even though they contain the same amount of calories - because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.
For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.
Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," says one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he says. "As a result, the desire to eat continues - it isn't turned off."
What's convincing, says Dr Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health and Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.
"It implies that fructose, at least in promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," says Purnell. He wrote a commentary appearing with the federally funded study in last week's Journal of the American Medical Association.
All sugars not equal
Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.
What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggests. "Try to avoid sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.
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