By Rajen M.

FRUCTOSE - innocently called "fruit sugar" - is "sweet but dangerous". This is more so if it is taken purified and in larger quantities that you would find in nature.

Fruits and vegetables have relatively small, "normal" amounts of fructose that most bodies can handle quite well.

The problem comes with added sugars in the modern diet, the volume of which has grown rapidly in recent decades.

The blame has often been pinned to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is made up of 55 per cent fructose and 45 per cent glucose. However, sucrose is half fructose and half glucose. So, HFCS doesn't have a lot more fructose than "regular" sugar, gramme for gramme.

High fructose corn syrup has become incredibly inexpensive and abundant. As such, it has become so cheap that it has crept its way into a great number of the foods we eat every day.

Today, almost all packaged foods have sugar added in some form, which almost always includes a lot of fructose. Fruit juice concentrates, sometimes used as "healthy sweeteners", usually have quite a lot of fructose. Processing these concentrates actually strips them of their nutritional value.