Book review Title: Fructose, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Sucrose and Health Editor James M.Rippe Publisher: Humana Press, New York ISBN: 978-1-4899-8076-2 DOI: 10.100/978-1-4899-8077-9

Reviewer: Professor Mike Gibney, Institute of Food and Health, University College Dublin, Ireland This book is a most welcome initiative at a time when the nutritional value of sugars is coming under increased scrutiny by writers of popular books and by the media. It is also timely that such a comprehensive review becomes available as the World Health Organisation revises its opinion on sugars and health. The book is divided into 5 sections: An Overview, a focus on the global perspectives, on the functional effects of sugars, on sugars and health and on sugars in chronic disease. In all, 37 authors contribute to 21 chapters, each of which begins with a series of key points. One of the most important chapters in the first section provides an historical analysis of all nutritional sweeteners but with a special focus on high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), its production and its composition. It shows that as HFCS was introduced into the US, that sucrose intake fell in parallel to the rise in HFCS over the next 40 years. During this period, obesity rates doubled but total sweetener usage didn’t show a comparable increase. In this section, Professor Luc Tappy from the University of Lausanne outlines the metabolism of nutritive sweeteners in the body and he concludes in respect to fructose ingestion in humans that 50% of the absorbed fructose is released by the liver as glucose, 25% as lactate and that 20% is stored as liver glycogen. A minor portion (5%) is secreted into the blood as very low- density lipoproteins. An important chapter in this section examines the evidence that liquids high in nutritive sweeteners might contribute to obesity and the authors conclude :"The epidemiological data, short-term appetite and feeding studies, randomized controlled trials, and mechanistic findings strongly suggest, but do not confirm, that energy-yielding beverage consumption is directly related to risk of weight gain" The next section deals with the global perspectives and looks at worldwide trends in nutritive sweeteners intake. The US data are very detailed broken down by age and sex and for all sources of nutritive sweeteners. For the rest of the world the data are quite limited and to some extent the chapter title is misleading. However, there are some interesting data. For example in Asia over the years 1963, 1973, 1983, 1993 2003, per capita sugar intake (g/capita/day) rose from 11.0, to 16.4, to 21.9 to 30.1 finishing in 2003 at 35.6. In contrast the corresponding figures for Europe are 82.2, 98.6, 93.2, 87.7 and 93.2. It is thus possible to imagine that sugar