> Avoid sugar like the plague, [...]including to a lesser extent natural sugar (apples, bananas, pears, etc - we’ve “weaponized” these fruits in the last few hundred years via strong artificial selection into actual candy bars), berries are ~okay.
If you need a sweet treat, some fruit is fine. If you're just starting to work on your diet and health, and you're trading fruit for chips or cake or any other "hyper-palatable" foods, great! Fresh fruit is undeniably a better choice.
But, fruit juice is approximately as good for you as any soda, and as you try to optimize your diet more and more, you'll want more fibrous fruits, less sugary fruits, and eventually a little bit less fruit overall.
But by then you'll already be pretty familiar with your goals and diet and how various foods fit in to them.
Yes - fruit juice that you buy in the store is typically pH balanced with ascorbic acid and heat pasteurised, which removes a lot of nutritional value. And in some cases an apple base is added to give sweetness (with lots of sugar). And depending on the degree to which the juice is juiced, you change the degree to which sugar and other nutrients are available to your metabolism before passing through.
There is a substantial difference in health value between a berry based smoothie you make at home and an apple juice from the store.
I’ve never seen anything marketed as fruit juice that did not consist of only fruit. If there is sugar added, it’s a different kind of drink and the label does not say that it is fruit juice. It might contain fruit juice, but it’s not called fruit juice. But I live in the western hemisphere so maybe the standards are different where you live.
Italy, and they're not called "Fruit juices" of course they're called "Succhi di frutta", of which fruit juices is the literal translation.
Yes they have always been called "succhi di frutta" even if filled with sugar and other stuff, I had no idea that in some countries those are not called fruit juices.
Yes, at least in my country (in Europe) I'm pretty sure that it's a recent trend to favor 100% single-fruit juices.
And I've seen the traditional juice fruite producers come up with increasingly comical/tragic ways to address it:
HUGE 100%, miniscule "natural ingredients" below it (so no motor oil at least xD )
HUGE name of a specific fruit, such specific fruit all over the box, big "100% fruit" and label saying 99.9999 apple, 0.0001 specificfruit powdered extract
You can safely eat 200 grams of tomatoes as the sugar and calorie amount is pretty low but it will make you feel satiated.
Meanwhile 100 grams of banana will have 5 times the sugar and calories of tomatoes (for 100g) but still is pretty fine if you restrict yourself at that 1 small banana.
200 grams of an apple is also pretty safe and is a nice snack.
The point about artificial selection is not far off, there was some news about a zoo having to switch to other food because today's fruits were starting to rot the animals' teeth [0].
But in moderation and ideally sourced locally it's probably fine.
I’d say in general no. Show me any unhealthy person that is that way from eating lots of fruits. When you dig deeper, it’s always the Little Debbie snacks they have in the cabinet and the fast food.
Avoiding fruits only comes after cutting out all processed sugar, or added sugar on the label. Then you should cut out all processed grains. Flour is basically powdered carbohydrate, which spikes your insulin in a manner not much different from table sugar. Then you can look at sugar. I would still include berries, they're low cal and the antioxidant content is insane.
Basically, you need to earn your carbs. Sugar is fine if you burn it off, that's why athletes drink Gatorade mid workout. If you eat an apple before a walk/jog/swim/etc, there's no issue. If you eat a pile of bananas while doing nothing, that glycogen has to go somewhere.
Probably not, unless your diet is already very good. Fruit is high in fibre and micronutrients relative to the average diet, is reasonably satiating, and is difficult to eat too much of without shoving into a blender or juicing.
If you're a biohacker, fruit's your biggest remaining problem, you've replaced the micronutrients with other sources, and you don't need fast burn energy, sure.
There is almost nothing in fruit worth taking. Especially not a tremendous amount of sugar. One apple can have amounts of sugar similar to Coca-Cola. Furthermore, a lot of it is fructose, which is basically a poison to the body. The sole purpose of human adaptations to fruit seems to be fattening, which makes evolutionary sense for survival in the time of scarcity, but not when you have food in abundance all the time. Note that it's also true that todays fruit is 'weaponized' by long-lasting preference to sugary variants so it contains much more sugar then in historic times and a lot less of other things like vitamins and minerals.
One other important reason is that such amount of sugar will block vitamin C as they are absorbed via the same mechanism (GLUT2). Blocking vitamin C absorption leads to all sorts of bad things, slowly, like lower immunity, higher cholesterol, fragile blood vessels.
The third important aspect is cancer feeding (which mostly relies on sugar, so even though the body makes it, you certainly do not have to ignite it) and effects on insulin which dysfunction is tied to both cancer and diabetes.
You should replace them with vegetables.
As a personal anecdote, my family and I almost never eat fruit (in last 20 years or so) - at most a couple of times per year. We all seem very healthy.
There is plenty of good stuff in fruits other than sugar. They are a great source of fiber and vitamin C, for example. Your overall point is worth reiterating, which is that fruits are not automatically "healthy", and may contain large amounts of calories and sugar.
No, there is not. Apart from some berries (particularly raspberry and blueberry) most of it is junk food that makes you fat, rises triglyceride and damages the liver.
Fruit is not a great source of vitamin C for the reason I mentioned. Red paprika is way better source for example, then any fruit. You better take a supplement too, liposomal variant if possible and/or film tablets.
You can get fiber from other, way more healthy foods, like quinoa seeds. Many people also remove fibers by juicing fruit, which is particularly unhealthy.
The fact that other foods can supplement or replace fruits is obvious. Most humans, however, are not surviving on quinoa and vitamin supplements. Therefore, your extreme position on fruits is misguided, because the average person is better off having a glass of orange juice than Coke, despite the calories being similar.
You were the one comparing apples to Coke. You also wrote this clearly incorrect statement: "There is almost nothing in fruit worth taking". When I pointed out that this is not the case, you misdirected the conversation to saying that other foods are equally or more nutritious than fruits.
Almost nothing worth taking that you can't get elsewhere, without all the junk. It's clearly true even for junk drinks - they usually have some low amounts of junk form of vitamins in them, but that is typically not why you drink them and you can find much better forms in higher dosages elsewhere, without the junk.
It's also logical. GLUT2 is a passive transporter and relies on diffusion. You will always have a bunch more glucose than vitamin C, so it will outcompete it.
The same transporter is used for both, as they are very similar - GULO gene transforms glucose to C.
There is a special C transporter SVCT1/2, a pump, that that doesn't suffer from this, but requires Mg/Ca for activation and is a lot less distributed than GLUT2. But then, eating modern fruit simple doesn't have much of it, and even that is lost around the conditions used. That's why no animal on the planet delegated vitamin C production to the plants, the amounts are far from enough for satisfactory workings of the body (except us, GULO mutants), alas high enough so you don't disintegrate (scurvy).
This might be one of the reasons why sugar diminishes the immunity (to be more precise, phagocytic index
) by around 50% several hours after eating it. Don't ask for study, there is Google Schoolar et al.
> your intake on fruit seem quite extreme
That means nothing to me nor anybody seriously researching this stuff. I rely on interpreting science documents. My or researcher interpretations might be wrong, but it's still the best we know so far. Contrary to that, unquantifiable "advices" like don't be extreme or that of moderation are best to left unsaid and all it does is tell me that person simply doesn't know anything about the topic and should be completely ignored.
> unquantifiable "advices" like don't be extreme or that of moderation are best to left unsaid
That wasn't meant to be advice, just my general, nonprofessional, take on nutrition recommendation until I am convinced otherwise. Which I gladly am, because I find human biology (esp. the metabolism) more and more interesting the more I know about it.
I only remember reading that vitamin c in its ascorbic acid form is the predominant way it is transported into the cells (by SVCT1,2 pathways) and DHA transports contribute only a way minor amount.
> This might be one of the reasons why sugar diminishes the immunity by around 50% several hours after eating it
Interesting, I'll try to find some reading material about that.
DHA is valuable transport since it doesn't require prerequisites and is ubiquitous, also SVCT doesn't transport DHA which you have tones of given that C is among other things ROS scavenger. Can't remember now the details, but I remember reading a paper where it was determined that DHA transport is substantial. Logically fallows that if you have to recycle C, its all you got, since you can't produce C.
Regarding immunity claim, here is something to get you started (50% claim):
> Oral 100-g portions of carbohydrate from glucose, fructose, sucrose, honey, or orange juice all significantly decreased the capacity of neutrophils to engulf bacteria as measured by the slide technique.
Is avoiding fruits a good recommendation?