Meryl Horn

And triglycerides are what fat is made of.

So Kimber told me, imagine you got someone who was willing to donate some of their body to science, and then... You took a big chunk of their fat, most of that fat is triglyceride.

Oh, so it's like the currency of fat in the body.

Right, exactly.

Does it look like anything, like under a microscope?

So, like, in the blood, it forms these droplets.

And over time, though, these droplets can start, like, stacking up in our blood vessels.

Like squishy bricks?

And that layer of squishy bricks narrows the blood vessels, and that can raise your blood pressure and up the chance of you getting a stroke.

It can.

So it can happen with glucose under like certain conditions, but fructose

fructose basically gets converted into triglycerides more easily.

It's sort of fructose's evil superpower.

And so now some scientists think that fructose is worse for us than glucose.

It does, but the fructose in fruit is okay because it's bound up inside the fruit.

It's like alongside all that fiber we talked about.

But with something like high fructose corn syrup, the fructose there is just kind of free floating.

And so there's this concern that that's particularly bad for our bodies.

But is it?

So Kimber wanted to know like what actually happens when you give people the stuff and just compare it to table sugar.