From this article.

The good news, exercise, in particular resistance training, is really good for you, even though for basic energy level control it's not that good it's own :

Exactly, in fact exercise is the best treatment. The question is why does exercise work in obesity? Because it burns calories? That's ridiculous. Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie, I mean you can't do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to work that off, that's not the reason that exercise is important, exercise is important for three reasons exclusive of the fact that it burns calories.

The first is it increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, in other words it makes your muscle more insulin sensitive, therefore your pancreas can make less, therefore your levels can drop, therefore there's less insulin in your blood to shunt sugar to fat. That's probably the main reason that exercise is important and I'm totally for it.

The second reason that exercise is important is because it's the single best treatment to get your cortisol down. Cortisol is your stress hormone, it's the hormone that goes up when you are mega-stressed, it's the hormone that basically causes visceral fat deposition which is the bad fat and it has been tied to the metabolic syndrome. So by getting your cortisol down you're actually reducing the amount of fat deposited and it also reduces food intake. People think that somehow exercise increases food intake, it does not, it reduces food intake.

And then the third reason that exercise is important, which is somewhat not well known, but I'm trying to evaluate this at the present time, is that it actually helps detoxify the sugar fructose. Fructose actually is a hepato-toxin; now fructose is fruit sugar but we were never designed to take in so much fructose. Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003.

The next thing is our old 'friend' fructose again.  Fructose really is a killer....

high fructose corn syrup came on the market after it was invented in Japan in 1966, and started finding its way into American foods in 1975. In 1980 the soft drink companies started introducing it into soft drinks and you can actually trace the prevalence of childhood obesity, and the rise, to 1980 when this change was made.

Correlation isn't causation, of course ...

the only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver. Glucose, the standard sugar, can be taken up by every organ in the body, only 20% of glucose load ends up at your liver. So let's take 120 calories of glucose, that's two slices of white bread as an example, only 24 of those 120 calories will be metabolised by the liver, the rest of it will be metabolised by your muscles, by your brain, by your kidneys, by your heart etc. directly with no interference. Now let's take 120 calories of orange juice. Same 120 calories but now 60 of those calories are going to be fructose because fructose is half of sucrose and sucrose is what's in orange juice. So it's going to be all the fructose, that's 60 calories, plus 20% of the glucose, so that's another 12 out of 60 -- so in other words 72 out of the 120 calories will hit the liver, three times the substrate as when it was just glucose alone.

That bolus of extra substrate to your liver does some very bad things to it.

Ok, so sucrose, or common table sugar, is 50% fructose and 50% glucose (glucose is ok, by the way, and it's the sugar in Staminade, but not in Powerade or Gatorade ... which is why we use Staminade in aboc C4P!).  Sucrose is just as bad as high fructose corn syrup.

fructose is famous for causing hypertension

And here we go :

Robert Lustig: There's clear scientific evidence on the fructose doing three things that are particularly bad in the liver. The first is this uric acid pathway that I just mentioned, the second is that fructose initiates what's known as de novo lipogenesis.

Norman Swan: Which is fat production.

Robert Lustig: Excess fat production and so VLDL, very low density lipoproteins end up being manufactured when you consume this large bolus of fructose in a way that glucose does not, and so that leads to dyslipidaemia.

Norman Swan: And that's the bad form of cholesterol.

Robert Lustig: That's correct. And then the last thing that fructose does in the liver is it initiates an enzyme called Junk one, and Junk one has been shown by investigators at Harvard Medical School basically is the inflammation pathway and when you initiate Junk one what happens is that your insulin receptor in your liver stops working. It's phosphorylated in a way that basically inactivates it, serum phosphorylation it's called and when your insulin receptor doesn't work in your liver that means your insulin levels all over your body have to rise. And when that happens basically you're going to interfere with normal brain metabolism of the insulin signal which is part of this leptin phenomenon I mentioned before. It's also going to increase the amount of insulin at the adipocyte storing more energy. And you put all of this together and basically you've got a feed forward system of increased insulin, increased liver fat, liver deposition of fat, increased inflammation -- you end up with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. You end up with your inability to see your leptin and so you consume more fructose and you've now got a viscious cycle out of control.

So who's doing this?  the food industry .. Sell more! Make more profit.  Unregulated capitalism at work ...

We can only eat 1,800 calories per capita per day. In other words the American food industry makes double the amount of food that we can actually use. Who eats the rest? We do, through this mechanism, they actually know that by putting fructose into the foods that we eat, for instance pretzels -- why do you need fructose in pretzels, why do we need fructose in hamburger buns?

Fructose makes you eat more, and makes you fat.  It's perfect for making people buy more food.

How do we avoid this nasty stuff?

Norman Swan: Well given that you're not going to come to harm by reducing the fructose in your diet -- somebody who's listening to this -- what's the ingredient on the packet, or the jar, or the back of the tin that tells you there's fructose in there because it won't always say fructose will it?

Robert Lustig: Well high fructose corn syrup, it should say that, now in Australia for instance the sodas don't have high fructose corn syrup they have sucrose. Well sucrose is half fructose. You know a lot has been made over this high fructose corn syrup being particularly evil. In fact high fructose corn syrup is either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest is glucose. Well sucrose is 50% fructose the rest is glucose. In fact high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are equally problematic.

Norman Swan: Basically table sugar.

Robert Lustig: Table sugar -- that's right. We were not designed to eat all of this sugar, we're supposed to be eating our carbohydrate, particularly our fructose, with high fibre. Well the fact is we have 100 pound bags of sugar that go into the cakes, and the donuts.

So don't drink orange juice, eat oranges :

Juice is part of the problem and there's plenty of data, not just mine. Miles Faith had an article in Pediatrics, December 2006 showing that in toddlers, in inner city Harlem in New York, in toddlers the number of juice servings correlated with the degree of BMI increase.

Toddlers drinking orange juice makes them obese!

And anyone who works for a soft drink company should be thrown in gaol.  Coke, Pepsi, Schweppes ... These evil bastards are loading drinks with salt to make you thirsty, sugar to hide the taste of the salt and spike your insulin levels to make you hungry, and the side effect of this increased sale of their crap is obesity.  Same with my favorite, Big M.  Whole milk is great for you, flavoured milk is chock-full of sucrose, which is 50% fructose, and that's the bugbear.  Damn you to hell, Big M!