There's an interesting study that came out a while back measuring body fat gained from either sucrose or glucose sugars.

 

De novo lipogenesis during controlled overfeeding with sucrose or glucose in lean and obese women.

 

This study used a Whole Body Calorimeter, which allowed researchers to measure exactly what people were burning (carbs, fat, or protein).

 

In this study, women followed these 3 diets for 4 days.

 

1. Maintenance Diet
2. Overeating Diet Where Sugar Came from Glucose
3. Overeating Diet Where Sugar Came from Sucrose

 

 

The overeating diet had 50% more calories than maintenance. So if maintenance was 2,000, the subject would eat an additional 1,000 calories with the two overfeeding diets.

 

About half of the overfeeding calories were fat and half were sugar.

 

In this example 500 extra calories of fat and 500 extra calories of sugar.

 

The study was focusing SPECIFICALLY on how much of the sugar consumed was getting converted and stored as body fat (using the Whole Body Calorimeter).

 

 

The results?

 

• On the maintenance diet with 240 grams of carbs per day about 1.6 grams of those carbs were converted to fat.
• On the overfeeding diet, with 375 grams of carbs per day, about 3.7 grams of those carbs were converted to fat.
• On average the subjects produced and extra 30 calories worth of fat from the extra 1500 calories of carbs and sugar they ate on the overfeeding diet.

 

In easy to understand terms.

 

In order for all of this extra sugar to get converted to just 1 pound of fat, a person would need to overeat like this for about 115 days, almost 4 months!

 

But...

 

The subjects did put on about 1/5 a pound of fat per day.

 

 

Almost all of that came from FAT in the overfeeding diets.

 

It takes a lot of energy to convert carbs to fat.

 

Scientists have wondered why the body even attempts to convert carbs to fat in the first place.

 

There is a hypothesis that the only reason the body converts a TINY amount of carbs to fat is for survival. Like if a human didn't have access to any fat and only ate fruit, the body would convert a very small amount of those carbs to fat... just the small amount needed for body functioning.

 

Carbs rarely get converted to fat to make any noticeable difference when it comes to stored body fat.

 

You literally have to stuff yourself for months, before this happens.

 

This is just another study highlighting this.

 

 

P.S.

 

In the study it didn't matter whether the sugar was glucose or sucrose on the overfeeding diets.

 

Only about 3.7 grams or 30 calories of that sugar was converted to fat.

 

Again... there are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat.

 

So it takes over 100 days of extreme overfeeding of sugar to add 1 pound of fat.

 

What I find funny is when people post pictures of donuts, showing how carbs and sugar cause obesity.

 

 

 

 

The irony is that it's the fat content in donuts that gets stored as fat, not the sugar or carbs.

 

Only trace amounts of carbs and sugar ever get converted to fat.

 

If the donuts were Fat-Free it would take a loooong time to see any significant fat gain from those donuts.