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
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.
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