Robert Lustig compares how glucose and fructose affect immune cells and neurons. Fructose boosts cytokine production and blocks glutamine from converting to GABA, raising oxidative stress. Rapamycin blocks this effect, suggesting it depends on protein synthesis.
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You can see here, we're giving glucose, or we're giving glucose and fructose, sucrose. The difference is sucrose has fructose and glucose doesn't. And we're looking at cytokines. And you can see that in each case, the fructose made those cytokines much higher. And that can be inhibited by a protein synthesis inhibitor, rapamycin. In other words, this is a protein issue, and fructose is inhibiting that. And when you put glucose into immune cells, you get lactate, and lactate's okay, here. This is L lactate. When you put fructose in, it basically inhibits the ability to metabolize it because it won't let the glutamine get turned into gaba and you end up with increased oxygen radicals. So you increase your oxidative stress in immune cells. Same thing happens in neurons.