We all know drinking soft drinks are not healthy. This may be due to not only the high sugar content but the type of sweetener, high fructose corn syrup. Medline linked high fructose with artery inflammation and increase heart disease factors. Read labels and watch how many packaged foods contain concentrated fructose or high fructose corn syrup.

Drinking high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the main ingredient in most soft drinks throughout the world, increases your triglyceride levels and your LDL (bad) cholesterol. These effects only occurred in the study participants who drank fructose — not glucose.

In the recent study on fructose, the Fructose-consuming participants demonstrated increased plasma concentrations of the atherogenic risk factors oxidized LDL-C (P < .0001) and intracellular adhesion molecule (P < .05), but those consuming glucose did not.

There are many factors that need to be explored. The high fructose is a sugar molecule that needs to be processed by the liver and this may be where the toxic effects are derived. We would recommend that your only sources of fructose come in the pure and natural form found in fruits and veggies. This is not the same concentrated fructose used in the study linked with disease. Again this is a wonderful example of how we take something good and create something harmful in the lab.

Because it is metabolized by the liver, fructose does not cause the pancreas to release insulin the way it normally does. Fructose converts to fat more than any other sugar. This may be one of the reasons Americans continue to get fatter. Fructose raises serum triglycerides significantly. As a left-handed sugar, fructose digestion is very low. For complete internal conversion of fructose into glucose and acetates, it must rob ATP energy stores from the liver.

Consumption of beverages containing fructose rose 135 percent between 1977 and 2001. Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose (table sugar) to corn syrup in the 1970s when they discovered that HFCS was not only cheaper to make, it was also much sweeter (processed fructose is nearly 20 times sweeter than table sugar), a switch that has drastically altered the American diet.

In 1966, sucrose made up 86 percent of sweeteners. Today, 55 percent of sweeteners used are made from corn.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Stick with sugars in that naturally occur in nature rather than those that have been concentrated or chemically altered