Are All Sugars the Same, and Which Should You Eat? | Cholsoon Jang PhD

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:02)
Welcome to The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where I believe a healthy world is based on transparent conversations.
In today's episode of The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, I sit down with Cholsoon Jang PhD. We discussed his groundbreaking research on fructose metabolism while he was at Princeton.
The difference between fructose and glucose, where the holes are in the nutritional research landscape today. We discussed this and so much more.
Dr. Jang is an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. Dr. Jang obtained a bachelor's and master's degree from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He then received a Ph.D. from Harvard and completed a post-doctoral training at Princeton University. Dr. Jang's laboratory focuses on understanding how dietary nutrients are processed in the body and exert health beneficial or detrimental effects. His laboratory is incredibly unique. It takes a multi-disciplinary approach. Recent focus in Dr. Jang's laboratory has included the synergistic or antagonistic effects between alcohol, fructose, and dietary fiber. I have to tell you, Dr. Jang's work is extraordinary. He is a world-class researcher. He has published 92 papers in prominent journals like Nature, Cell, and Science, which are cited over 8, 500 times. Dr. Jang is truly a thought leader.
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Dr. Jang, thank you so much. Dr. Cholsoon Jang, I'm so grateful to have you on the show. You are extraordinary and a shout out to Dr. Alexis Cowan who made the introduction. You received your PhD from Harvard. You did a postdoc at Princeton.
And you are now, are you at University of?
Wonderful. And you are working as an assistant professor. You've done some extraordinary research. I still remember when you had a cell paper that came out and it is the small intestine converts dietary fructose into glucose and organic acids. That was like this big legendary paper, which I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your research, how you got interested in the gut microbiota, and of course, your research in fructose.

**Cholsoon Jang** (6:04)
Fantastic. Thank you very much.
So, yeah, so to answer your question about how I got into this fructose field, it was actually a funny story. So I was interested in nutrients for a long time, and then I joined my post-doctoral fellowship lab in Josh Labrador's lab at Princeton University, and I was trying to figure out what I want to study, and I talked to Josh for several times, and Josh one day came from some conference, and he said, hey, we got to study fructose because this is so popular everywhere, but I don't think we really understand well, and we have very good techniques to study this kind of nutrition, how they are processed in the body, how different organs and microbiome cooperatively digest fructose and where they go, why fructose is connected to different disease. So that was fascinating conversation with him, and so I just sit down and figure out what's known and what's unknown in the literature. And yeah, there are so many things known and unknown, sometimes something like controversial, so I wanted to study that at the time.