Will fructose make your heart explode?

It may sound strange, but it is entirely possible a diet of pure corn fructose could severely damage your heart.

In 2001, The Murky World of High-Fructose Corn Syrup, by Linda Forristal, appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2001. It was obviously written before high fructose syrup was being added to baby formulas which appears to be happening now. But it does give a foreshadowing of things to come. She cites a study by the USDA which found that a diet of corn fructose (HFCS) caused all sorts of health problems in mice. Mice are frequently used in studying the safety of foods and drugs because they share many mammalian traits with humans.

From the article: “Sucrose is composed of glucose and fructose. When sugar is given to rats in high amounts, the rats develop multiple health problems, especially when the rats were deficient in certain nutrients, such as copper. The researchers wanted to know whether it was the fructose or the glucose moiety that was causing the problems. So they repeated their studies with two groups of rats, one given high amounts of glucose and one given high amounts of fructose. The glucose group was unaffected but the fructose group had disastrous results. The male rats did not reach adulthood. They had anemia, high cholesterol and heart hypertrophy–that means that their hearts enlarged until they exploded. They also had delayed testicular development. Dr. Field explains that fructose in combination with copper deficiency in the growing animal interferes with collagen production. (Copper deficiency, by the way, is widespread in America.) In a nutshell, the little bodies of the rats just fell apart. The females were not so affected, but they were unable to produce live young.”