Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease [0] is a thing, AIUI it's largely caused by how fructose is handled exceptionally poorly by the liver.
Sucrose (sugar) is basically half fructose and half glucose.
I often encounter people who don't realize common sugar is half fructose. So even if they understand that a diet "high in fructose" is a risk factor for these things, they don't necessarily appreciate that sugar == fructose. They'll moderate their fruit intake, which isn't even that problematic because soluble fiber is like a fructose antidote. But won't be as careful about sugary junk foods/drinks devoid of fiber, which is where the real problem actually lies.
Fructose is most commonly found in fruit. I am still trying to work out if fruit is a healthy option or not. (Nutritional science can't seem to make up their mind on much).
Fruits are also packed with nutrients/vitamins and are way more satiating than a small can of coke, the later serving 0 purpose in a diet besides temporarily relieving a sugar addiction
The salient point intended by my comment is that nutritionally, sugar/sucrose is fructose.
The bond linking the glucose and fructose subunits in sucrose is cleaved immediately by an enzyme in the stomach. From that point on, the fructose subunit is no different from fructose found in fruit (or HFCS for that matter) and handled identically by the liver.
Except the volume of refined sugar you find in processed foods/drinks containing sugar generally far exceeds the amount of fructose found in intact fruit, while also lacking any protective soluble fiber.
"Sucrose, a disaccharide, is a sugar composed of glucose and fructose subunits" - wikipedia page for sucrose
stuff without sugar. It's one of the few things that nutritional science seems to agree on, sugar is bad, and the more processing involved in a food the worse it is.
> Data from 90,504 postmenopausal women, aged 50 to 79, over nearly 19 years of follow up [... showed that] women who consumed at least one sweetened drink per day were 73% more likely to develop liver cancer than women who had three or fewer sweet drinks a month. Women who drank one or more sweet beverages daily had a 78% higher risk, according to the data.
Ok, so there's a big difference between 0.1 per day and 1.0 per day, but more than that is almost negligible. No control for other lifestyle factors, though I'm sure we could confirm this even approximately with self-reported activity measurements.
It is embarrassing to me we fund shit science like this.
Surely, someone who eats chocolate cake everyday day also has health issues compared to those who do not because of the correlation with poor lifestyle choices that someone who eats chocolate cake everyday is bound to have.
How many people eat a good diet, exercise regularly and have a non-diet coke everyday? Basically no one.
Sucrose (sugar) is basically half fructose and half glucose.
I often encounter people who don't realize common sugar is half fructose. So even if they understand that a diet "high in fructose" is a risk factor for these things, they don't necessarily appreciate that sugar == fructose. They'll moderate their fruit intake, which isn't even that problematic because soluble fiber is like a fructose antidote. But won't be as careful about sugary junk foods/drinks devoid of fiber, which is where the real problem actually lies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...