So, in this study, they created metabolic syndrome in the rats by adding in 30% Fructose (not sucrose) into their drinking water. Take a look at the table below. “SD” stands for Standard Diet, and “HF” for High Fructose. The SDS and HFS groups had Sterculia Oil added to the same respective diets above.
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If you look down to energy intake, you can see that the rats given the High Fructose diets consumed almost twice as many calories as the standard diet rats. And since they ate less food, that means that over 50% of their calories came from pure fructose (again, not sucrose). This is a staggering amount on its own, and there would be very little glucose consumed with it (whatever starch was in the food). Mike Fave pointed out that rats don’t have the ability to handle large amounts of pure fructose, and any animal might struggle with getting 50% of calories from pure fructose. However, even with that massive increase in calories, the HF rats only gained about 10% more weight (25 grams) than those on the standard diet. The rats that got sterculia oil along with the high fructose weighed about the same as the SD rats, even eating 75-80% more total calories.
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