All sugars are not created equal. The sugar in an apple pie from McDonald’s is not even a distant cousin of the sugar in a crisp, organic apple.

I’ve preached time and time again on this blog – fat doesn’t make you fat, sugar does. You may have noticed, however, that I advocate apples, blueberries, and Japanese yams. All of these items contain sugars. I even use them to curb any sweet cravings I experience.

Runts candies may be shaped like fruit and contain fructose and glucose like fruit, but that’s where the similarities end.

Grab Comstock’s “More Fruit” pie filling to bake into your dessert and you put this into your system: Apples, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Water, Food Starch-Modified, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Salt, Caramel Color, Xanthan Gum, Erythorbic Acid (Preservative). You get blasted with 21 grams of sugar in about 1/3 of a cup for a single serving.

When you eat a half a cup of blueberries, you are consuming 7.5 grams of naturally occurring sugar. You reap the nutritional benefits of antioxidants and fiber. Most important, you are enjoying a real food. It has a single ingredient. It literally is what it is. From Huffington Post:

Whole fruit has a lot of fiber, which actually slows down your body’s digestion of glucose, so you don’t get the crazy insulin spike (and subsequent crash) that candy causes. That also means your body has more time to use up glucose as fuel before storing it – as fat.

I chuckle at the thought that this is a necessary discussion, as though the junk foods we consume actually are made with real sugar in the first place. What you may not realize is just how much added sugar you’re consuming. You know when you have a Coke, you’re gulping down the highly addictive high fructose corn syrup masquerading as sugar. Did you realize, however, that many of your sauces, breads, yogurts and any processed food you can possibly imagine contain the drug? Hey supplement guy, your Muscle Brownie contains corn syrup, deal with it. And yes, I said drug. From digitaljournal.com:

In experiments, rats were fed diets containing different levels of HFCS. They were then taught to press a lever which controlled how much syrup they received. The researchers found that rats responded to diets containing large amounts of HFCS in the same way that cocaine addicts respond when addicted to the drug. The more concentrated the syrup, the harder the rats worked at pressing the lever to obtain the taste enhanced food.

According to the researchers, the findings of their study suggest that foods with high levels of HFCS have the same addictive properties as cocaine and could partly explain the global obesity epidemic.

I’ll wrap this up with some common sense. Sugar from fruit comes from a tree or bushes that grow on the earth. The sugar in processed food comes from the kind of plant that man makes, not the kind that sprouts.