How does the body react to sugar from fruits differently to foods like cake, soda etc? Are the insulin spikes same for both the food? Why are people who are trying to lose weight or diabetic people asked to eat fruits and cut down cake and soda when both contains sugar?
In: Biology
It doesn’t. It’s just that fruits contain a lot more nutrients than processed refined sugars – fiber, vitamins, antioxidants, etc. Diabetic patients have to manage around the sugar spikes that come with all food.
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Soda is just sugar in water. When you drink a soda, your body processes that sugar extremely fast and ram-jams it right into your liver and bloodstream.
A piece of fruit contains sugar, but it’s trapped in a sponge of fiber. The fiber is hard (or impossible) for your body to digest, and the sugar is much more slowly extracted from the chewed-up fibery mess that you swallow. The resulting blood sugar spike is much much slower – more of a bump than a spike.
Cake has a *little* fiber but besides the fat and protein of butter and eggs, it’s mostly sugar and starch, which your body converts fairly rapidly into sugar. Starch is very close to sugar and so easy to convert that your saliva actually converts it to sugar in your mouth.
Sugar stored as a natural product of the food has to be “unlocked” from the food by your body. Eating direct additive sugar requires far less breakdown and spikes your glucose much more quickly and to much less long lasting effect.
Something of note is that there *are* different kinds of sugars. Fruit has a lot of fructose – just like high fructose corn syrup. That fructose is the same molecule either way. Table sugar is sucrose, which is one glucose and one fructose stuck together. [Glucose, fructose, and sucrose are used slightly differently in the body.](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/sucrose-glucose-fructose#absorption-and-use) Glucose is the sugar that your body actually uses, so everything has to be broken down and/or converted into glucose before your body uses it. Lots of fructose affects your liver, since that’s where it gets turned into glucose.
As such, a diet that is high in fructose may be worse for you than other sugars.
However, the vast majority of the time, you’re going to be consuming both fructose and glucose together – either bond together as sucrose, or as high fructose corn syrup which is ~50/50 fructose/glucose (although not bound as sucrose). So the vast vast majority of the time, the problem is not the *kind* of sugar you’re consuming, it’s *how much* sugar you are consuming.
Other comments are very correctly pointing out that fiber slows down digestion, and fruits contain a lot more fiber (as well as other important nutrients). The other big important thing that fiber does is fill you up. If your stomach is full of fiber, you will feel full and feel less hungry, so you’ll stop eating. Since fiber is so hard to digest, you’re going to get a lot less sugar out of the fiber itself, which means you’re eating the same amount of mass and getting less sugar out of it.
Because even though fructose (the main sugar in fruit) is a simple sugar, when it’s eaten in whole fruit, it comes packaged with water and fiber and other nutrients, which slows its absorption (reducing the insulin spike). In addition, it’s less concentrated, and the bulk of the fuit helps you feel full so you don’t get as much sugar in one sitting.
The simple sugars in fruit juice, soda, and sugary foods are rapidly absorbed.
It isn’t. Whole fruit is healthier because it comes with fiber which makes you feel full and vitamins. This is why fruit juice isn’t healthy for you as the industry would have you believe.
Most fruits contain dietary fibre, which came from bee polleting the flower
Where processed food contains a high amount of sugar
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