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Metabolic syndrome

F stands for fructose and fat

Nature volume 502, pages 181–182 (2013)Cite this article

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Fructose and glucose have the same caloric value, but the two sugars are metabolized differently. It emerges that mice that cannot metabolize fructose are healthier when placed on carbohydrate-rich diets.

A drastic increase in dietary sugar consumption in the western world during the past four decades has been paralleled by epidemics of obesity and metabolic syndrome, suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship. Yet the relative contribution of individual sugars — as opposed to total caloric intake — to this epidemic remains controversial. For instance, increased intake of fructose, which is enriched in soft drinks and processed foods, has been proposed1 to greatly contribute to these disorders. However, this proposal has not been universally embraced2. Two studies by Johnson and colleagues, published in Hepatology (Ishimoto et al.3) and Nature Communications (Lanaspa et al.4), now investigate the role of fructose metabolism in obesity and metabolic syndrome using a mouse model that cannot metabolize this sugar. The results strongly support the theory that fructose over-consumption has toxic effects.

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Figure 1: Sugar metabolism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Costas A. Lyssiotis and Lewis C. Cantley are in the Department of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York 10065, USA.,

    Costas A. Lyssiotis & Lewis C. Cantley

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  1. Costas A. Lyssiotis
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  2. Lewis C. Cantley
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Correspondence to Costas A. Lyssiotis or Lewis C. Cantley.

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Competing interests

L.C.C. owns equity in, receives compensation from, and serves on the Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Board of Agios Pharmaceuticals. Agios Pharmaceuticals is identifying metabolic pathways of cancer cells and developing drugs to inhibit such enzymes in order to disrupt tumour-cell growth and survival.

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Lyssiotis, C., Cantley, L. F stands for fructose and fat. Nature 502, 181–182 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502181a

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