There’s also quantity. Eating an orange is healthy. Drinking a glass of orange juice is like eating six oranges after removing the fiber
Why are fruits and berries healthy, even though they are mostly just sugar?
Submitted 4 hours ago by nimpnin@sopuli.xyz to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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AA5B@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Alsjemenou@lemy.nl 1 hour ago
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.
harambe69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
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.
spongebue@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
SatyrSack@quokk.au 2 hours ago
Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Notorious for having a long life…
spongebue@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I thought about that as I wrote it! I stand by what I said.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
So where’s does he claim to only eat fruit?
Are you confusing it with him recommending to use Apple?
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
1/2 bottle of Ranch an appropriate amount?
GrilledCheese@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
For the first half of the meal, yes.
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 45 minutes ago
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.
snek_boi@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
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.
Otherbarry@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 2 hours ago
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 your body won’t absorb that as a natural sugar complete with the other nutrients the berry used to have… 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.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
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.
dditty@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
Eating a few pounds of grapes in a day is probably a bad choice
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 😔
Eq0@literature.cafe 3 hours ago
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.
bluGill@fedia.io 2 hours ago
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
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2 hours ago
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
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 1 hour ago
It’s the vitamins. These tiny black things that crawl on top of the fruits…
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
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.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
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.
9point6@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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)
Teppichbrand@feddit.org 2 hours ago
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.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I guess it worked if you wrote this.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 2 hours ago
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.)
Lembot_0004@discuss.online 4 hours ago
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.nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
I don’t think no 1 is a valid argument as that applies to all food
Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Fructose is the element in sugar 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.Lembot_0004@discuss.online 3 hours ago
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.
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
[deleted]Buffalox@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
If lembot_0004 is a bot, it is in fact a shitty bot as was commented, that gives clearly false information.
It was clearly an error in judgement by the moderator to remove the above post.
Please restore!
FelixCress@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Ideally focus on grapes fermented into beautiful wine and eat the rest in moderation.
bryndos@fedia.io 8 minutes ago
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.