Ever hear the carbs are the devil crowd pushing people to not eat fruit? Yep that’s a thing!
Deductive Reasoning (stay with me) is when a conclusion follows from a premises. Here we have:
Premise 1 – Sugar is bad
Premise 2 – Fruit contains sugar
Conclusion – Fruit is bad
The problem here is that sugar is not actually inherently bad, rendering the next step and conclusion ill-thought out. But I can see where it comes from. If you are beaten over the head by the same information over and over (sugar being bad) it starts to stick.
So it’s not bad?
Fruit is good, in fact I’ll go further and say it’s great! Not only does it taste amazing, it contains fibre, vitamins and minerals. All of which are consistently shown to have multiple health benefits.
Part of the stigma seems to come from linking carbohydrate consumption with obesity. As fruit is made up from simple sugars (fructose and glucose) it is then over extrapolated to fruit makes you fat.
Now adding sugar to food does increase palatability (making it easier to overeat). However fruit tends to have a relatively low energy density, which along with the fibre content means you are less likely to overeat it. To put that into context I’ll use one of my fav comparisons which is 1 tablespoon of peanut butter is approx the same calories as 200g of strawberries. Which of the two of those would fill you up more?!
A review by Stephan Guyenet (2019) I quoted in the caption below. This looked at RCT’s (ranging from a few days up to 2 years) and long term observational studies. They consistently supported the conclusion that fresh fruit probably does not contribute to obesity and may have a place in the prevention and management of excess adiposity.
For balance telling people to simply eat more fruit if they are trying to lose weight may not be efficacious. You need to be aware of the calorie content when adding anything in to the diet. Unless you are also taking something else away. Energy balance yet again!
As always beware when people advise to cut out whole food groups. Especially those like fruits (or vegetables) which are time & again linked with positive health.
On health…
Extra point on disease risk; a recent review by Mossine et al (2020) looked at dried fruit and the association (as always this doesn’t equal cause and effect) with cancer. The conclusions included; “Overall, data presented in this review indicate that increasing dried fruit consumption to 3–5 servings per week may have health beneficial effects related to risk of certain cancers.” So again there is no smoking gun telling us fruit is bad. Potentially (probably?) the opposite.
(Reposted from Instagram)
