Dr. Ron Najafi explains browning, the chemical reaction between sugar and protein that ages tissue. Fructose glycates proteins seven times faster than glucose, and drinking orange juice demonstrates how quickly dietary sugar accelerates the process.
Questions this video answers
Seven times faster.
88-year-old.
Chapters
Here's newborn rib cartilage, nice and white. And here's 88 year old rib cartilage, nice and brown. You are browning as we speak. And if you had orange juice for breakfast, you are browning seven times faster. Now, why does this happen? Here's glucose. You'll notice glucose has an aldehyde group on the position one of the linear form that aldehyde combined to an epsilon amino group of lysine at position one on the hemoglobin molecule, which will then form a shift base which will spontaneously decompose to form this covalent linkage. And we call this the amidori rearrangement. You're all familiar with that. This is what hemoglobin A1C is right here. And that's what we measure in diabetics to see how high their blood glucose has been. It correlates with the degree of blood glucose elevation. All true. Turns out fructose, the sweet molecule in sugar, does that reaction seven times faster.