If healthy men eat 80 grams of fructose or table sugar every day for 7 weeks, their liver starts making and releasing about twice as much fat as before—but eating the same amount of plain glucose doesn’t do that.

If healthy men eat about 80 grams of sugar (like table sugar or fruit sugar) every day for 7 weeks, their body still burns fat normally in muscles and blood—but their liver starts making more fat.

Drinking sugary sodas and other drinks high in fructose may cause your liver to make more fat than when you eat glucose, leading to fatty liver and other health problems.

Eating fructose (like in sugary drinks) makes your body store more fat around your organs and liver than eating the same amount of glucose, even if you’re not eating too many calories overall.

If you eat a lot of fructose—like from sugary drinks—for just 9 days, even without gaining weight or eating more calories overall, your liver becomes less responsive to insulin, which means it keeps making sugar when it shouldn’t.

Eating a lot of sugar like high-fructose corn syrup makes your liver produce more fat than eating a lot of fatty foods does, and this happens in both people and mice.