Why are fruits and berries healthy, even though they are mostly just sugar?
from nimpnin@sopuli.xyz to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 06 Oct 17:06
https://sopuli.xyz/post/34798084
from nimpnin@sopuli.xyz to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 06 Oct 17:06
https://sopuli.xyz/post/34798084
#nostupidquestions
threaded - newest
1st: they are NOT healthy. You just never eat berries in such amounts as you consume sugar in confectionery things.
2nd: there are many different types of sweet substances. Some are worse like sugar, others are safer like fructose.
I don’t think no 1 is a valid argument as that applies to all food. Also, fructose is a sugar
Fructose is the element in sugar (Sucrose) that actually taste sweet, it is also the part that is unhealthy. it acts somewhat like alcohol.
Giving similar problems and can also cause dependency.
If you want to know the basics about sugar I don’t think there is much better info than this out there, absolutely worth a watch:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
I don’t remember the concrete names of the substances; my point was that there is a variety of them and they react differently in the body.
You made 2 false claims, and now you say you don’t actually know what you are talking about.
Yes, I kind of figured that out already.
Glucose by itself tastes sweet
Glucose by itself is also very unhealthy
Fructose is twice as sweet as Glucose, and while we do use Glucose for energy the same is not true for fructose, and fructose is way way more harmful.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetness
Sure, but the fact remains that glucose is sweet.
Unless you have FLD the vast majority of metabolic damage is from persistently elevated blood glucose. There is no dietary requirement for exogenous glucose in our food.
So is 100g of fructose worse then 100g of glucose? Sure, but glucose is still quite bad and abundant in most people’s diets.
This is true, we can make all the glucose we need without eating any sugar at all.
True.
There is sugar, absolutely. And that’s probably where most of the calories come from. But there is also water, cellulose (fiber), and vitamins/minerals - doesn’t have much non-sugar caloric value to change that balance, but it’s still important. And nobody serious is suggesting you eat only fruit, so you can get non-sugar calories from other sources and it can be balanced in the big picture.
It’s kind of like an appropriate amount of dressing on a salad, the good outweighs the bad and makes you more likely to actually eat that nutrition-positive food.
Source: I’m some guy on the Internet. You can trust me.
1/2 bottle of Ranch an appropriate amount?
For the first half of the meal, yes.
Are you both from the US? It was rough getting used to how much you all like to drown out the food with various sauces
It’s called: “Fatland”.
No, and I was just havin a gaff
<img alt="" src="https://mg.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/stevejobs.1419962519.jpeg">
Notorious for having lived a long life…
56 is long if you were born around 1901
Is it? I always thought lower life expectancies were dragged down by infant mortality. Basically if you survive the crib you’d likely live into your 70s.
Yeah, that’s what my dad says, and he’s a medieval historian, so I believe him. I guess it’s possible that lifespan in 1901 was much shorter than the middle ages, but that seems unlikely
When referring to diseases, yeah, but there was also a lot of death from wars and other violence, severe injuries from dangerous labor, and labor was pretty risky. If one was healthy and avoided injury they were certainly on par with modern life spans.
I’m pretty sure Jobs either didn’t die at 56 or wasn’t born around 1901.
around
Maybe ± 70 years.
I thought about that as I wrote it! I stand by what I said.
So where’s does he claim to only eat fruit?
Are you confusing it with him recommending to use Apple? 😋 (/s)
Also the man was insane. If you based on false beliefs make decisions against professional advice, that are detrimental to your well being, and even put your life in danger, that is AFAIK a very key aspect of being insane.
He was someone who was a fruititarian at various points in his life. He was also someone who didn’t shower at certain points in his life. And he went for alternative medicine when he got sick.
OK, that only confirms to me that he was in fact insane. There is no way we are supposed to eat only fruit, it simply doesn’t provide any real energy, but consumes as much to digest as it yields, meaning there is no way to survive on fruit alone.
He chose to not listen to medical advice for cancer and instead dragged things out with 'alternative medicine' long enough that real medical treatment wouldn't be successful anymore but still pulled strings to get a transplant.
He was nuts.
He’s also responsible for getting the ball rolling on enshittification. When you could connect an ipod to a computer, the files were scattered to a billon random places, and you were FORCED to have itunes.
Now, every single fucking thing has to come with their own app. fuck this.
My ex- decided to become a fruititarian, with hopes of becoming a breathitarian someday after reading about a yogi who allegedly had done so.
Emphasis on the ex-.
With the amount of AI slop out there, in this day and age this is actually a surprisingly high level of trust.
Admittedly when I wrote that I had moments like “cellulose is in fruit, right? And that’s fiber?” and when I googled with neutral terms I mostly trusted Google’s AI slop 🤣
Fiber. Fiber helps you feel full, so it is harder to over-eat fruit in comparison with chocolate bars, gummy bears, or even fruit juice.
Healthy is relative. A handful of fruit is generally fine. Eating a few pounds of grapes in a day is probably a bad choice. There’s also a lot of people that conflate fruit with things that have fruit in them as about the same.
I have IBS and since grapes are FODMAPs (in high quantities) I should only eat like a handful at a time otherwise they can cause uncomfortable stomach cramping and diarrhea for me 😔
How the sugar is packaged is also important. Standard white sugar is refined to be easier to digest - less gets pooped out. Fruits and berries sugar is (mostly) fructose with fibers and other elements. In the mouth fructose tastes equally sweet but the stomach has more troubles digesting it and converting it into usable energy. So you absorb way less and poop out way more.
Sugar - sucrose - is split into frutose and glucose in the stomach. your whole thesis is not how digestion works. Frucose is processed in the liver, but all other claims are something I've never seen real science back up
Fruits tend to get listed as low GI supporting the poster’s statement.
Also, you’re simplifying the chemistry and metabolic pathways to the point they sound the same when they’re obviously different. I’m not an expert but I as I understand it table sugar is short chain and good to go, fruits (if they’re not pre cooked) tend to be a bit more complicated and have a few more steps along the way (and I assume each requires some energy to unlock and also result in some chemical energy that isn’t completely digested). Also, what you’re saying goes a lot against what I understand from the carb count on the packet from fibre vs. what your body unlocks. That said, I’m very ignorant and far from an expert
Fiber makes a big difference with fruit. it slows down absorbtion on often sugars are locked in fiber needing time.
Glucose affects the gi it is absorbed directly into the bloodstream. Futose cannot be used directly and so the liver processes it - no gi index applies.
Sucrose generally implies no fiber and so the simplification works fine. With the added constraint that only half of the molecule is glucose and influences the gi index.
that is as far as I know things so I need to stop. Even then I'll stand corrected if an expert weighs in (though it is more likely the 'expert' is self proclaimed and really knows less than me so I place a high burdon of proff for correcting me despite this not being where I'm an expert)
What specifically in the original post did you have issue with? There’s not a lot too that post, and you have agreed with part of it, so it seems like it would be faster to list out the issues
Whole fruits are pretty healthy in reasonable moderation
if you gorge on 3 boxes of grapes you’re still gonna have smashed through over a thousand calories
The big caveat is fruit juices which remove all the fiber that makes you feel full, particularly anything concentrated.
At that point you’re getting closer to a soft drink than fruit (though you’ll still at least get the vitamins)
Ideally focus on grapes fermented into beautiful wine and eat the rest in moderation.
All that sugar is bound up in fiber, making it slower to release and keeping it from spiking your blood sugar into pre-diabeetus. Grind that same fruit down (juice), destroy its fibers, and now you got diabetes in a can.
A nutritionist will be better able to explain this but I’ll give it a try :)
You’re maybe overthinking the sugar part of the equation. Berries/fruits contain natural sugar that is a part of the fruit itself. Your body processes that differently since that sugar comes integrated with other nutrients (fiber, Vitamin C, antioxidants, etc.). And you typically won’t want to eat say a few buckets of berries in one sitting to equal the same sugar high you get in a processed sugar, all that fiber will feel much heavier and your body is just going to tell you to slow down on its own.
The much worse types of sugars are added sugars e.g. sugars that were processed and now exist separately, then re-added into something else. Take your berry example, process all the sugar out of them so only the sugar exists, then you add those sugars to some other food you wanted to sweeten. Now it’s a sugar without any integrated benefits (no fiber/vitamin C/antioxidants/etc/) - your body won’t process this processed sugar the same way it used to when it existed as part of the fruit… you’re only getting the bad without anything useful. So you can gobble a whole ton more of those added sugars to get your sugar high without your body getting any indicators to hey, slow down, maybe it’s time to stop eating these added sugars.
Please read (or listen to) How not to die. It is a great book, funny and full of cool information, it changed my life a little.
Here’s a review focused to some extent on how accurate the science in that book is:
www.healthline.com/…/how-not-to-die-review#TOC_TI…
The author seems pretty focused on pushing a single message so I’d be careful with that message myself. (As someone who aspires to have a diet that’s mostly vegetables with a few cheat days for meat.)
I guess it worked if you wrote this.
There’s also quantity. Eating an orange is healthy. Drinking a glass of orange juice is like eating six oranges after removing the fiber: not heslthy
If I remember my highschool biology correctly (which I probably don’t, so take this with all the grains of salt), natural sources like berries, fruits, etc… create natural glucose which is what every living organism (including us…use for energy). Meaning when we eat berries and fruit, that natural glucose doesn’t need to be converted or processed in order for our body to make use of it. That also gives it a more stable effect in our system.
Refined sugars, on the other hand, need to be processed into glucose before it can bind to (oxygen? I think?) and pass into our bloodstream. That process leaves a lot of junk leftover which can have detrimental effects.
Again…I’m trying to remember a 35 year old highschool biology course, so correct me if I’m wrong.
You’re off I think, been that long since biology class for me as well. Sucrose, glucose and fructose are the same molecule, just arranged differently. That has some effects on bio uptake, can’t remember what.
close but not quite
All carbohydrates have to be converted into glucose. Your breads, pastas, starches, etc
All forms of glucose can be used directly, without the conversion. But that does not make them healthier by any stretch
They are not mostly sugar, sugars are just a part of the nutrients. Most fruits don’t even have that much sugar in them, it varies wildly though. There is also the way these sugars are intertwined with fiber, that make it much harder for these sugars to be processed in your body. So the sugars are released over a greater period of time giving your body more time to react. as opposed to refined sugars. Fruits are always healthier than candy, cookies, or soda.
There is a lot more in fruits than just sugars, there are proteins, vitamins, minerals, fibers. Which are all necessary for a healthy body. Sugars as well are necessary for your body to function.
It is practically impossible, if you’re otherwise healthy, to eat too much fruit. I personally eat at the very least 3 kilos or 5 pounds of various fruits a week. within an otherwise varied (vegan) diet. I’ve done so for the past 10 years. I make sure to test my blood, and so far had zero issues except low vit. d. Which you can’t get from fruit.
Why is it healthy? Well, we evolved next to fruits. Our ancestors always plucked and eaten them for millions of years. Just like we’ve done with all kinds of plants. Our gi tract is the right length, our body cant make most vitamins itself and completely functions on sugars. Fruit is part of a varied diet.
It’s the vitamins. These tiny black things that always crawl on top of the fruits…
The dose makes the poison, really. It’s quite hard to reach a harmful amount of sugar by just eating fruit - you’re likely to get either full or bored with eating fruit before you start reaching unhealthy levels of sugar. Combine this with fruits and berries generally being a good source of dietary fiber, this makes for a good combination of attributes you want in healthy food.
There was some guy on telly did a test.
Half the group had to eat oranges.
The other half had to drink orange juice.
Then swapped them over the next day.
I can't remember the exact setup but i think it was like 'eat/drink as much as you want, stop when you feel full'.
Everyone was able to consume far, far more calories in juice form and probably far more sugar than they needed.
I think like even eating enough oranges for 1x300ml glass was hard for many people to do in fruit form.
Basically, the rest of the orange filled them up and that's what we're better evolved for: slower digestion of a more varied mush and lots of fibre and stuff like that.
The juice is far too easy for us to eat way more than needed.
Juice being bad doesn’t necessarily make the whole fruit good. The glycemic index still has to be considered in the context of the person and their diet.
You’re just another shill for big juice, Pulptastic.
/s in case it’s not obvious
Sorry, to clear it up I’m team juice very bad fruit occasionally.
They are like 11g of augars in 100g lf berries. They are not mostly sugar
Well, mostly water. But besides that, it’s mostly sugars and fiber, in that order.
I think that seems to be the gist of the answers here, the sugar is all bundled up with other stuff that makes it both difficult to efficiently digest from the surrounding bulk and filling because of that bulk and also a bunch of water.
Because it takes quite a lot of effort to eat a huge amount of sugar in the form on fruits and berries. They also have some vitamins, fibers and other stuff in them too.
RN here, it’s because your body has a more difficult time accessing the sugars in fruit form. They are wrapped up in multiple types of fiber which add bulk to your digestive system and serve as kind of a shield for your body to less easily access the sugar. The juice is essentially just the sugar with all the fiber strained out, has others have said this causes a situation where you can drink the calories from like 18 oranges in 45 seconds, and your body can access it immediately and easily. This is also why whole fruit is actually a good thing for diabetics because the glycemic index is actually pretty low.
Flavonoids and polyphenols. Cleveland Health has articles on both.
Some years ago some medication I was on put me at risk for diabetes (not an issue now), and my Dr. at the time mentioned the benefit of fruit, however I never really asked them to elaborate.
Thanks for that explanation, it makes a lot of sense the way you’ve described the function. You learn something new everyday!
Is it weird that I woke up this morning wondering the same exact thing? 😳
A bug in the matrix
Because these are naturally grown sources of sugar that is untainted by the joke of the food industry's idea of processing sugar?
The issue with processed food isn’t the artificial part or the refined part, it’s the calorie dense part. Fresh fruit juice is processed sugar, vegan pizza is highly refined, and organic granola bars are still highly processed.
The calorie density makes it far too easy to over consume, and to do so regularly.
Sugar is produced naturally in sugar beet and sugar cane plants.
Whole fruits are a treat that can be tolerated by a healthy person in very moderate quantities. Think about the quantities you would get if you went out physically picking fruit off of a tree. So not a big bowl of easy to consume fruit from the grocery store, but when you put the physical effort in… It’s ok
There is no essential nutrition in fruit, historically, the role of fruit was as a fattening device before winter. An opportunistic caloric boon.
The biggest argument in favor of citrus fruits is there vitamin c. In the modern dietary context with really high blood glucose levels there is competition for the natural vitamin c pathway, the glut4 receptor. Citrus, by virtue of flooding the body of vitamin c, gets enough vitamin c into these cells and wins the competition with the blood glucose levels.
If a whole fruit offsets something worse you could eat, like a candy bar - then yes it is healthier then a candy bar, but it’s also healthier then a cigarette. That doesn’t tell us much about its essential levels of “health” in isolation.
Tldr: whole fruit is a sometimes treat, but it does not contribute to your health.
I couldn’t be more wrong if I tried
I’ll grant you my position is unpopular, but I haven’t seen any data indicating it is wrong.
People can, and have, lived long happy lives without any fruit.
nobody would argue that
Help me understand your position then. What was wrong about my original comment that fruit is a treat best enjoyed in moderation?
Because sugar isn’t unhealthy in the first place, you’ll die without any sugar.
Most obtuse comment thus far.
While there are essential fats and proteins, there are no essential sugars. Your body can work perfectly fine indefinitely without any sugars of any kind.
They’re probably thinking about glucose, which is the sugar in “blood sugar”. You’ll die without it, but it’s created endogenously in the liver and kidneys.
You won’t die if you don’t eat sugar
People have spoken a lot about how digestible the sugars are, but in terms of overall healthiness, the fibre is an important component even beyond its impact on sugar absorption. Many people do not get enough fibre in their diets.
Are they? Depends how many you eat.
<img alt="" src="https://files.catbox.moe/6486eo.png">
You think this obese monkey was eating raspberries? They probably got into a human garbage. Get real.
Do you think being fat didn’t happen to any humans or animals before the invention of processed food?
That’s a good question. What evidence do we have for the existence and prevalence of obesity in prehistoric humans?
Sugar: THE BITTER TRUTH
youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM
Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. Recorded on 05/26/2009.
He is so well spoken, and his work is very impactful!
fiber
Pretty much this. Although the antioxidants and other phytonutrients might also play a role, and a lot of those are bound up in the fiber.