Richard Johnson, MD explains how fructose lowers cellular ATP and triggers a survival response that makes you eat more. Biopsies of obese people show low ATP in muscle and liver, suggesting the body keeps eating to restore energy, not just from lack of willpower.
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When you give fructose, it's really the only nutrient that lowers ATP and that stimulates all these things that we would call a survival response. And what supports this is, like, if you take a person who's obese and you biopsy their muscle or their liver, you'll find that the ATP levels are low, even though the person's eating more food than you are, and, you know, and so forth. What's happening is they're eating because their ATP levels are low, and they're trying to. To bring the ATP levels back up. And eventually it will come up, but at the expense that you now have extra calories on board. So the formula turns out to be the same. You are eating too much, and you are exercising too little, or you actually, your resting energy metabolism is decreased. And. And the consequence, though, is that it's being driven by biology, not by choice.