Fructose is a simple monosaccharide sugar that gives fruits, berries honey and table sugar their sweetness. It is also derived from the disaccharide sucrose.
Monosaccharide is the simplest form of carbohydrate in that they cannot be reduced in size to smaller carbohydrate units by hydrolysis.
It is broken down by human bodies into glucose then into glycogen. The predominant site of fructose metabolism is the liver, where fructose enters the intermediary pathways of carbohydrate metabolism.
Fructose is converted to glucose, lactate plus pyruvate, glycogen and triglycerides. Fructose is more lipogenic than glucose and is therefore more readily converted to triglycerides which can exported and stored in adipose tissue.
Fructose is the sweetest sugar found in nature. Fructose in a fresh fruit is not harmful, because of its fiber, vitamin, mineral and flavonoid content.
Fructose is provided in the human diet in the from of the popular food sweetening agent HFCS which tends to be more than 60% fructose.
What is fructose?
