Hey Adam, as someone who is currently in higher education, thank you for helping teach me how to read and understand research studies better. It has helped a lot with essays and research papers that require going through dozens of studies and figuring out which ones are more valuable than others.

A wise man once said "the best sugar is the one we made along the way"

Also, it seems like the obvious underlying variable in the added sugar study was lifestyle outside of eating. People who eat more whole, unprocessed foods also tend to have a larger health focus that includes exercise and general healthy living techniques. I'd love to see a meta-analysis that controlled for weekly exercise, sleep habits, etc.

I started watching what I eat about 8 months ago, around when you posted the episode about seed oils. I haven’t cut out sugar entirely, but I’ve changed all of my soda drinks to diet soda, which has helped me maintain a calorie deficit alongside more frequent exercise. Since then I’ve dropped 35 lbs, I look a lot better, and I feel a lot better in my own skin, which is something I think you’ve talked about at some point

The problem is that many processed foods use apple juice concentrate (or some other fruit juice) as a loophole to prevent their sugars from getting classified as 'added sugars', despite apple juice concentrate being pure sugar water and having basically no fiber or micronutrients.

Hey Adam! Thanks for today's video. Because you mentioned the recent study regarding Erythritol at the end, I think there's something important to keep in mind about it for you to take a gander at in preparation for the next episode if you get the chance. Erythritol is a naturally occurring substance in the human body, which gets produced around the time of cardiovascular events as it turns out. That study on the effects of erythritol, as far as I understand it, did not control for naturally occurrences of Erythritol versus added erythritol to food. Which could be especially problematic when drawing conclusions about it's alleged link to cardiovascular events. Looking forward to the next ep!

I'd love to hear you do a podcast where you examine the whole dairy cycle, from grass to cow to milk to human cowsumption and nutrition...

One of the "gotchas" of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that there are many common formulations, and the formulation does not need to be listed on the ingredients label. For instance, coke and sprite use HFCS55 which is 55% fructose and 45% glucose which could lead to the malabsorption of the fructose, but many/most fruit juices use HFCS42 which is 42% fructose and 58% glucose so we would expect even more efficient absorption of the fructose than with sucrose (50/50 glucose/fructose). Both products would just list "High Fructose Corn Syrup" on their label.

-us to -i is how you pluralize some words with Latin roots, like cactus/cacti. Words with Greek roots, however, are different. For example, octopus has Greek roots, so the plural isn't octopi, it'd actually be octopodes - but, honestly, the correct answer is probably just octopuses. Octopi would be considered a hypercorrection, by the way. Anyways, glucose has Greek roots (comes from γλεῦκος/gleukos). Greek words that end in -os/-ος become plural by changing -os/-ος to -ee/οι. So, the plural of γλεῦκος/gleukos would be γλεῦκοι/gleukee. Bringing that to English, I'd guess the correct plural of glucose would be something like glucee. *Edit:* Y'know, while researching this comment, I ran into the corrections that the people replying to me have said. They're right, my information is incomplete (and likely wrong in some parts), but thanks to Cunningham's Law, I've now learned *why* I was wrong, so that's neat!

“Rare sugar” is a great name for something…a band, an album, a movie. Probably anything except a TV show for some reason.

Just gonna comment this after looking at newest first on some of your non traditional recipes. There are SOOO many haters who don’t use constructive criticism and just discard a recipe because it’s not what they do, which annoys me to no end. Please keep going with your cooking videos and don’t listen to people like them.

I was born in the mid 80's and grew up staying away from fat and salt but loving sugar. From that i prefer to snack on candy over salty snacks. Now my doctor says I have to cut the sugar out of my diet and it feels like my happiness has been taken from me.

vinegar is considered a 'sugar' in the sense that it has calories and it is mandatory to put these calories in food labels. If they have calories, where do they fit in our 4 macronutrient model? Carbs!

Thanks for another great podcast Adam. FYI from a biochemist’s standpoint, we would say “glucose molecules” or “molecules of glucose”, rather than pluralizing the chemical name. In that way, it’s similar to saying “loaves of bread” rather than something like “breads”. We pluralize the units, not the substance.

Another great listen, Adam! Thank you for digging into fine details on the things you discuss, it makes any topic youve covered infinitely more listenable. Keep it up!

I remember years ago watching a talk by Robert Lustig (pediatric endocrinologist) about the dangers of refined sugars. It’s a fascinating but confusing topic. I appreciate Adam’s deep dive on sugar.

I always click Like right when then video starts, since I know I'm going to like it anyway.

When you mentioned maltodextrin, I was licking doritos dust off my fingers. I flipped the bag over and verified your correctness.

I am one of those listening for the first time (you're welcome). I can't belive the video was almost an hour long, it went by like 15min. I subbed probably around halfway, you are a great communicator.

Glucose apparently derives from Greek gleukos, so the plural would be glucoi, not the Latinate gluci, or some such. PS, the amount of pedantry in these podcasts is epic. 😍

✨ "It's not the sugar, it's what the sugar comes wrapped in" ✨

I made a STEVIA sweetened apple pie the other week. Turned out just like I wanted! No other sugars or sweetners other then the apples and the tiny amount of powdered stevia concentrate. Made it up on the go because I really really wanted pie but not overdo sugar or search for recipes (other then check that pure stevia don't burn to crap, it's fine) and let just do this! It was some fairly sweet red-yellow apples I had at home, not sure what kind. Mixed a few mini scoops of Stevia with a bit of corn starch, cinnamon, cardamon, pinch of salt and coated the cut up apples. Added a splash of water. Only buttered the bottom of the pan and made top crumble crust by chopping wheat flour and one mini scoop of stevia together with a stick of butter, a bit of oatmeal and another small pinch of salt and cardamom and covered the improvised apple filling. Into the oven until it got a pleasing golden brown color! It was amazing! Perfect level of sweet and tart flavors, for me, and did not have any weird sweetener after tastes. Of course, not having any idea what my actual proportions were now means I may never achieve this masterpiece again. 😂Still, it's nice when creativity works out. Life is good!

You are definitely my favorite teacher. Teacher of... well... everything! Thank for being so clear, insightful and talkative. Now: mi dispiace ma... in italiano, the plural of glucosa is actually glucose. With an "e", as it's a feminine word. "Le glucose" though would be a badass name for a female mobster gang. Auguri and keep it up!

This was awesome! I especially enjoyed your explanation about malt barley. I used to make my own beer, and would malt my own barley. Lots of fun!

7:42 i think what you're looking to say is "glucose monomer", monomer as in a single unit (mono) as opposed to a polymer of many of them stuck together

I've loosely followed Weight Watchers for years now. I think it's much more useful as a "healthy eating lifestyle" than a "diet", but I also believe that's how we should eat. Count me a believer in their plans.

Where I live now in Malaysia stingless bees are kept, friend of mine sells the honey on his market stall and also I find the occasional wild hive when out walking in the forest.

Adam, you never fail to impress! Thank you for such in-depth information about sugar! You blew my mind with ants making honey! Down another rabbit hole I go... lol Hopefully I can impress you with this other random fact: certain ant species also grow mushrooms! Seriously, look it up!

MeUndies are underrated. Got the subscription like a year ago and I’ve been slowly phasing out all my old stuff

Yeah… I miss the pod coming out Sunday in Europe :p Another great one Adam!

I live in the Amazon rainforest where there are abundance of banana everywhere, we even have a soup that is made by 7 different types of bananas. It's way more difficult to find candy bars here in the rainforest XDDDD

I feel like we just need a classification of sugaroids the way we have metaloids. Metaloids are things that tick the boxes of metals... sort of... sometimes... some of them. But they aren't all-the-way metals or all-the-time metals or some other limiting factor, but they're more like metals than they are non-metals so we just call them metaloid. As for glucoses, I'd give it a long E like 'indices' and... many general greek plurals.

This was super helpful for me as I learn more about my wife's diabetes. Thank you Adam!

As someone who developed gout last fall and gave up 90+% of added sugar as part of a diet designed to lower uric acid production I very much look forward to the next installment. I tried using allulose and monk fruit sweetener for some baking tasks but the indigestibility led to the same gi tract problems as too much fiber (allulose farts is a fun term to search for!).

You make Mondays my favorite day of the week!

I tried your pickup line on my current fling, worked like a charm. Thanks Adam

The earliest I've ever been to a podcast.

A comment on acids: All acids are Lewis acids or bases i.e. they either accept (acid) or donate (base) electrons . When a hydrogen is lost or gained during the electron transfer, the molecules can be called Bronsted-Lowry acids (give up a hydrogen) or base (accept a hydrogen). The third type is Arrhenius acids and bases, which are simply the Bronsted-Lowry process done in water wherein the hydrogen leaves as a hydronium ion (in the case of acids), or when the hydrogen is accepted it leaves behind a hydroxyl ion (in the case of bases). So Arrhenius acids are a sub-set of Bronsted-Lowry acids, which are a sub-set of Lewis acids. Love your content Adam! I especially love the deep dive into a topic during the Monday podcasts. Vinegar Chicken on the Right.

Thanks Adam, I spent this time crocheting 6ft/1.8m of honey. I await part 2, I am only 1/2 way finished!

as a type 1 diabetic, i am incredibly eager to listen to this one

While I agree that if someone's takeaway is "I can eat as much fruit as I want", that's good. However, the much more realistic switch, the one I've experienced people deciding on in real life, is "I need to switch from soda to storebought juice with no added sugar". That's a ton of "natural" sugar, usually no fiber, and no vitamins you couldn't get elsewhere. Maybe juice is better than soda, but most of the time I doubt it's by much.

I always look forward to your content, its the best to listen to while cooking or on a long commute

3:32 "like your mother and I did in the old days"💀💀

Hey Adam, it was an awesome episode. I'm actually REALLY interested in this subject, I'm a first year med student. Could you please add the links to the other studies you mentioned trough out the episode, thank you very much.

You should do a podcast on FODMAPs. The science is super interesting in how eating a diet that’s low in FODMAPs helps people with IBS. It’s not a fad diet ether, as it not designed to help you lose weight but help you manage your symptoms of IBS. Fructose is consider a high fodmap food but what’s interesting if they find people who add extra glucose to their foods that it doesn’t help with the absorption of fructose.

N of 1 here, Whole Food Plant Based for about 8 years now. Dropped in weight and cholesterol at the beginning, and have stayed steady in terms of weight and cholesterol since. Eat ad libitum as much fruit (including dried) as I wish. No added sugar or oil. It is easy once you get used to it, and keeps things simple. Whether it is because I eat less 'sugars' or because there is so much fiber and nutrients I get together with my sugars is an interesting academic question, but pragmatically it just works.

a video going over how consumption of ultra processed foods, particularly fast food, effects our body from the time of it hitting our tongues to the time its digested would be amazing. i just watched something that went over that but the presenter did not name sources. she claimed that ultra processed foods digest faster causing because they had been stripped down so much causing spikes in insulin and that the additives cause inflammation in the body because our cells dont know what to do with them so our immune systems become aggravated. as someone who does not have the healthiest diet and has struggled for decades with acne and seb derm, it would be nice to hear from someone who actually does the research and shares sources

This was extremely interesting, I'm looking forward to part 2.

As a father of type 1 diabetic I can strongly relate to "It's not sugars but other things it is wrapped in". However I would like to sterss that the way it's wrapped is also important. One big apple has a same amount of sugar as medium banana, but doesn't spike blood glucose as fast and as high as banana. But the moment you pass it through a blender and drink - oh boy, it spikes fast. Baking it also "unwraps" it and makes it faster to digest - BG spikes faster, and as I understand more sugar gets absorbed into blood rather than passing to the large intestine for all the flora. There's generally accepted rule of thumb in diabetic community to "never drink your carbs" because of these effects (obviously with the exception for emergency carton of juice that insulin-dependent folks keep at hand in case of hypoglycemia)

Thanks Adam for all your research!

50:17 First time listener here. ✌️This episode was totally sweet!

I dig the podcast series. Great content and format, and I’d say even more since your new working schedule.

Fantastic work! Really thoroughly prepared and well presented! Very enjoyable and quite educational aswell.

The problem is that, at least in the USA, _everything_ has added sugar. I challenge anyone to find one packaged food that doesn't.

Great episode. It caught my attention that when you were talking about the link between fructose and asthma. The recent hate on gas stoves because there’s a statistical link between gas stoves and asthma, but I wonder, did they take into account that poorer areas would have unvented gas stoves, but they’d also have poorer diets with higher fructose consumption. There are so many variables that studies can lean towards or ignore certain factors depending on who’s funding it.

Adam I have been a big fan for a long time. You were the first cooking KZfaq show I subscribed to. That being said, I was a fan of the short format videos - I simply don’t have time to consume content that is an hour in length. The videos that you used to release that were very targeted, on topic and to the point - I could watch them, but also search for them later and know you got to your point quickly - were, in my (completely un-asked for) opinion, some of the best cooking videos on the internet. I don’t understand why you’ve switched to this long form “podcast” type video - they’re simply too long for me to have time to consume. While you haven’t lost a fan - never that - unfortunately you have lost a regular viewer, for whatever that’s worth.

I feel like I'm being aggressively taught by a caring teacher and I'm *here for it.*

With all this chemistry talk, we should rename it "Ask Atom"

So much of what we call things is basically the equivalent to what engineers do nowadays with how they name things, "just put a placeholder that describes the thing until i find something better", but then you never find a name and just call it the name you initially had. 'Grit' really was just the name that some guy who was experimenting gave the name to the weird sweet thing they got in the pot and then they never gave it an actual name.

My objection to your take on “added sugars” is that things like fruit juices do not contain “added sugars” but will absolutely spike your blood sugar. I have had to learn a lot about this and artificial sweeteners because my amount of sugar consumption has started to cause health concerns, and I would like to reverse that trend before it becomes something more than a bad number on a blood test. So I await the next episode because all this is still confusing to me.

I lost 30 pounds while in southeast asia for a summer eating crazy amounts of fruit. Meat, rice or noods, tiny amount of cooked veg here and there, and tons of fruit throughout the day and for desert.

I appreciate you, thank you for making content.

boomer here. when i was growing up and reading strange science facts, one of the most common was "a lemon has more sugar in it than a watermelon." don't know how accurate that is, but it has stuck with me for five decades

Thanks I need these podcast! Waiting for your part 2 about artificial sweeteners. 👌

i’d love to see a video talking about allulose, maybe make some desserts using it instead of a glycemic sugar, caramelizing it is something no other substitute can do (well except tagatose but nobody makes that, and i’m sure there’s other sweet sugars that are non glycemic). also in the sequel i hope you mention the cool study where they added allulose to food without removing other carbs and it lowered the glucose spike

This was extremely interesting and very enlightening Adam! Thank you ❤

You obviously don't have a nectarine tree in your yard. All the fruit comes ripe at the same time, and nobody wants to let excellent, sugary nectarines go to waste. Gorging oneself on all that fruit seems to be a definite possibility! 😉

Note that High Fructose Corn Surup (HFCS) is around 50/50 glucose fructose, it is high in fructose compared to regular corn syrup, which is all glucose (made by breaking down cornstarch, which is long chains of glucose linked together, into individual glucose units). HFCS usually comes in 2 varieties: -HFCS42 which is 42% fructose and 58% glucose (mostly used in processed food and breakfast cereal) -HFCS55 which is 55% fructise and 45% glucose (mostly used in softdrinks) -Other ratios of fructose:glucose are possible but uncommon The sugar composition of honey will vary by source, but generally also contain slightly more fructose than glucose (although it may also contain small amounts of sucrose, which is 50/50 fructose and glucose, and maltose which is 2 glucoses, which might offset things, but it's not guaranteed). Agave syrup, another sweetner beloved by hipsters, when made from blue agave, has around 56%-60% fructose but only 20% glucose, and traces of sucrose, so even higher fructose:glucose ratio than the HFCS55. If made from green agave, however, it's mostly sucrose. In other words, you probably don't need to worry about HFCS too much unless you are particularly sensitive to fructose or if you drink a lot of soda sweetened with HFCS.

This podcast was actually a revision for the Biochemistry chapter in my Chemistry book

Sugar is a bomb. By the way, I have difficulty communicating because I had a stroke in Broca’s area, the part of the brain that controls speech. 2/8/2021 but I lived again. (My wife helped me compose this.)

Adam - I love everything you do, but my favorite thing of all is the billy joel/sting podcast with Meg. It is the funniest thing I ever heard and Meg is hilarious. Will you/could you and Meg please do more of these? Or was it just a pandemic thing? It's the best thing you do!

What a sweet episode...

I'll be turning 28 this year. One thing I can remember about my early childhood, besides the Got Milk campaigns, is the "if it ends with 'ose, then it's gross" campaign. It was to help us kids identify all the different types of sugars in food, so that we can better control our intake. Glucose, maltose, dextrose, fructose, sucrose, lactose, and more are all things I learned about because of this. It's crazy the criticism that campaigns like DARE, Got Milk, and the one I mentioned here get, but they certainly do have a lasting effect and impact. The problem is that the people making these campaigns are educated and intelligent, while the people targeted(kids) generally are not. To pick up on this implication of intake control through identification only worked for the few who were keen enough at that young age to pick up on it. It really left A LOT to be desired, because most people didn't get it and were left thinking, "what is the point" because the point went above their heads.

That ad transition was smooth af

16:34 totally true, my grandma love their bees, she has jataí, uruçu and mandaçaia. Never bit anyone, but some twine in the hair of some people.

Great podcast! Though I think a lot of people already had the take-away "all added/refined sugars are bad" in recent years, looking at the many health bloggers who promoted agave syrup, coconut sugar, smoothies, or those cakes where blended dates and bananas were all the sweeteners used but that still came out on the same calorie count as your regular cake. Seems to me it's less about the source of the sugar and more about form: your regular banana takes a while to eat, requires chewing, and will leave you fairly full, no need for a second banana. But a smoothie with banana and some other fruits can be gulped down quickly and will not fill you up as well, so besides being already more fruit (and thus more sugar) than the single banana, it also more easily invites a second portion (and blended/juiced fruits seem to taste sweeter? And sweetness invites more eating). Idk about the cake though - does the act of chopping the fruit and baking it already destroy the good effects of the fibrous "wrapper"? I'd love to know if there are studies into that. Fascinating topic, sugar.

i noticed processed sugar (or added sugars) gives me heartburn, and my chronic bronchitis also gets much worse, i cough more and breathing is more difficult, my throat gets all gunked up. i did not know fructose was more water soluble than glucose, but now it makes sense why my body reacts this way to artificially sweet things, but not to naturally sweet things like fruit. i should mention i live in europe, high fructose corn syrup is not really a thing here.

I have a hard time believing that adding sugar to a salad dressing is somehow more dangerous than eating a banana. "Added sugar", "processed" etc. simply have a high correlation with food low in micronutrients and in a cohort study this will obviously be correlated with adverse health outcomes.

Thanks for these vids adam!

I have a gripe. HFCS often has less fructose than glucose. There are different kinds, but "high" is relative to the amount in corn syrup, not to the glucose. Most solid food HFCS is lower, like 40:60 - 45:55 while a lot of soda and such uses more like 55:45. It's worth noting that, while honey and agave are touted as healthy alternatives to sugar, they are essentially HFCS. Agave is particularly high in fructose, up to 70% iirc

I read somewhere that you can eat 20% more fructose before your brain starts to feel you had enough. So after soda companies switched to HFCS the bottle went from 16 to 20 oz. I can't remember the source, so take with grain of salt.

It probably should be Gloukoi for the plural of Glucose, it comes from Greek apparently. The reason that paper outlines for why fructose is absorbed more slowly than glucose has to do with how it is absorbed, fructose relies on facilitated diffusion and transport proteins (stuff that requires energy and specific proteins, therefore if you only have so many of that transport protein you cannot absorb all the fructose at once), glucose uses passive diffusion (high concentration to low across a membrane). It sounds a lot like a question you would get on an AP Bio test

From Brazil here. Just came back from a friend's house on the beach, north coast of Sao Paulo state, and guess what? Dude's got a small beehive in his backyard, the stingless kind, honey that's bit more liquid-y than the ones you usually get at the market (even here). It's delicious because it's not so overwhelmingly sweet, and it's great on toast for breakfast. Just had to say something when I heard him talking about it.

My favorite Podcast :)

I failed 9th grade chemistry 13 times...all on the same day. I passed on sweet # 14 because they had to give me the first test again & I remembered one of the answers. One question. My teacher very kindly & gently told me I was part of the reason she was going on a year's sabbatical. I think she was slipping into a fuge state. I watched her stumble away to pack her office. Poor woman. I hope she recovered. Currently I live an almost 100% sugar-less life, including fruit...(I'm fighting chronic illness/infection/genetic conditions). And yet, and yet you suckered me in. "You sneaky naughty thing, you." -My Sister Well played Adam, well played.

sugar....oh honey, honey! it's Adam Ragusea!

I'm weird. I've been on the anti sugar train for like 6 years. Generally, i avoid any kind of "added" sugar, but have no problem with fruit, as long as its actually eaten, not juiced. I'd much rather drink a diet coke than regular coke, but sparingly either. I feel like most processed sugars are just injections into the "food" we eat in mass, so your best bet is to just eat as natural as possible. 1 coke is like 8 oranges without any of the pulp and fibre... thats a lot of oranges.

delighted to learn that you write your scripts in textedit

How do you know so much! I love these podcast.

Sweetest episode I've ever seen....

It is interesting that the liver, in metabolizing sugars and sugar substitutes, include brief transitional forms through formaldehyde to formalin, never stored or retained, just a point along a longer metabolic chain.

I'm legitmately so happy that Adam has found the perfect medium to mansplain things to us. 47 episodes strong!

Hey Adam, I missed something in the sugar paper at the end. You mentioned that the paper loosly states that a diet high in added sugar might increase the risk of CVD, the scientist did offer some explanations but I didn't hear the word 'fats'. Might it be that the group consuming a lot of added sugar also consumes a lot of saturated fat? I mean, often times, cake, waffles and such are high in sugars, but in (saturated) fat too. If they didn't account for this covariate, it could've lead to wrong statistical conclusions due to (multi)collinearity.

My relationship with sugar is long and tortured. As a kid, I lived on sugar until I was hospitalized with malnutrition and kidney disease. In recent years, I found myself going keto for awhile. It wasn't deliberate, I just listened to what my body told me and ate accordingly. After all that, I lost 60 lbs., without trying, again, I shut up and listened. At the present, I understand how many carbs of what kind I can handle in a day, a week, a month. I mostly eat a healthy diet, but I have splurges of sin once in awhile. Today's dinner is mackerel casserole, with potatoes filling the dish (boiled, steamed-off), canned mackerel, chiles, evaporated milk, a carrot and some peas, with sauteed onion and celery added, salt, pepper, garlic, and dill. Topped with Panko (my first time ever using it). Oh, and an egg. Anyway, I'm babbling, it's rum-and-making-dinner time, so I'll go do that. Thanks for the great content, Adam. I am always entertained and educated, which is my ideal KZfaq channel.

Can you add talks about those low/no calories sweeteners when mixed with table sugar as well. Once fall season comes around I like to make a lot of fruit/vegetable desserts and I am hoping to find a middle ground between no calorie sweeteners and just using sugar.

Well this is a great video. There are ways to produce L-Glucose in vast amounts by bio reactors and editing genomes of single cell organisms, not that there is much point to it. As we saw with plain chemistry, producing the mirror molecule or other mirrored axis, can lead to extreme problems with health. Contergan probably the best known case. Just chemically creating sugar from raw resources, would result in a D/L mix. (racemic glucose) Burkholderia caryophylli is one of a few known organism to be able to metabolize L-Glucose and potentially the one of the best model organism to learn and create a bioreactor for it's production.

first time listening, because I saw the topic and was interested, but I do watch your normal videos. I was waiting for you to get to sweeteners as I am curious to what you have to say about the likes of stevia, maltodextrin (covered here), glycerine, erythritol or even something like cultured dextrose. I'll check out part 2 later.

Hey Adam, this episode is great and very informative. However, I still got a question running laps in my mind. Some doctors have pointed out to me that the sugar found in fruits when made into a juice, no longer is a healthy as just eating the fruit whole. In guessing it has to do with the fibers breaking down and the fact that many restaurants and palces add more sugar to fruit juices. Is consuming fruits in a juice form unhealthier than eating the fruit whole? Does this align with research? or is it another common thing not being right type of deal?

I'd really appreciate it if Adam talked a bit about the discoveries of some artificial sweeteners. Let's just say that while lab safety is very important, without people doing really stupid things in and around their chemistry labs, we might not have some of the most popular sweeteners today :)

Rrrrrgh....! Adam, what would it take for you to go back to releasing the podcasts on a Saturday or just later in the week? I listen to them Sunday morning, before the family wakes up, while I make my soup, clean the kitchen, and get ready for breakfast. This "Wait 6 days" thing doesn't work for me!