To really not get the whole fruit/smoothie thing?

[FedupofbeingtoldIcantusemyname]

I always feel like I'm missing something in these conversations.

Obviously eating too much whole fruit or smoothies is not good as both contain lots of sugar.

However I really can't understand those people that assert that smoothies are soooo much worse for you than regular whole fruit.

Surely if you eat, say 1 apple (50 calories?), 1 banana (100 calories) and drink a 250ml glass of milk (100 calories) it is calorifically identical to drinking a smoothie made with 1 apple, 1 banana and 250ml milk. Isn't it?

I am assuming, in this example, that the smoothie is home made in a blendy thing (like I have) that just chops everything up to liquid rather than a juicer.

Aibu?? Why are they supposedly so bad for you? Surely the fibre etc in the fruit in the smoothie doesn't leak out or evaporate if you make it and drink it straight away? Am I completely wrong?

I can't see that juicing fruit destroys the cells any more that a good chewing would.

Sweet corn pancakes or whatever you want to call them. Being slightly obtuse there lrd there are plenty of recipes around that call for liquidised sweet corn and the principle stands whether you make them like that or not.

Unfortunately the fibre/sugar thing is down to science and the human body but shrug what does that mean.

Hate you know sugar is carbs? Whatever form it takes.

Not being obtuse - just not come across them. To me sweetcorn fritters are quite common, but I don't know of recipes that call for liquidised sweetcorn. Are they like tortillas?

I'm asking because it seems to me no one can quite explain how it is that mushing food would actually damage all of the cell walls. I admit I am no scientist, but I can't picture it.

I suspect it's down to our sinister evil lizard overlords controlling us by making awesome delicious things start off really healthy and yay then battering or will by announcing it's just shit in a cup and killing us.

They've done it with cigarettes, booze, coffee, steak, I absolutely never know whether eggs are going to kill me or save my from one week to the next, oats, pasta, various grains. Kale's next, or miso soup as the murder food.

I forgot prawns too. They want to stop your heart, now.

I think you're onto something there honey.

Think of eating fibre like one of those bath plug hole hair trappers when you wash your hair over the shower in the bath. Eating fruit with fibre like an apple represents a full hair trapper, which greatly slows down the discharge of water down the plug hole. Likewise, in the body, it greatly slows down the rate that sugars are released into the body, and hence evens out the secretion of insulin so you don't get big spikes and troughs. Insulin is a fat storage hormone.

On the other hand, consuming a smoothie, with little fibre left from blending, is like just letting water down the plug hole straight, with no impediment. A big intake of sugar all at once will lead to a big insulin spike. Also, you can eat much more fruit in the form of a smoothie cos you can just chug it down in 3 mins, rather than having say 5 pieces of whole fruit on a plate in front of you. Eat fruit, but eat it whole

They're doing it to keep us down and control the uppity masses LRD it's definitely time for tin foil bonnets.

Can eat ham anymore because you will immediately get cancer, interestingly our corporate overlords are still cool with is holding small computers next to our heads lots though.

It's not necessarily the cell walls. Even just think about surface area to volume.
If your gut can digest peanut then compare swallowing a peanut whole (without the shell) to eating an equivalent amount of peanut butter.
If gut transit time is say four hours, the peanut won't get digested much because it can only be worked on from the outside in and there's not much "outside" compared to much smaller food particles.
The peanut butter can be digested from all angles because it's already partially digested and has much more surface for gut enzymes to get to work on. So same for
If you chew an orange up really conscientiously, you still have a lot of fibrous matter left which is largely indigestible. If it's smoothied, it's broken down into more digestible fragments so doesn't act in the same way as fibre from a whole fruit.
So it's not necessarily microscopic but macroscopic changes to the structure of the fruit, veg, nuts, seeds etc which make the sugars inside them more easily accessible by the body.

To those saying that you will consume more fruit in a smoothie than you would eating whole fruit....... er....... isn't that the whole point?

What happened to '5 a day' ?
I started making smoothies so that we all did start consuming a bit more fruit. Not enough was eaten beforehand.

Vicky by that logic a smoothie with a black coffee chaser is the ultimate weight loss plan?

MrsM - that makes sense. But is it necessarily such a bad thing? Wouldn't the same be true of (say) fruit juice - again, as far as I understand it not being a scientist, it's fine to have a small portion per day so long as you don't neglect other things. And that is even less 'mush' than a smoothie.

Yes Backforgood you are eating more fruit but it's not the right fruit, it's FRUITSOFDEATH™

Agree with the pp who says blended fruit is similar to well chewed fruit.

I still don't really get why the fibre would somehow disappear when a fruit is blended. The fibre doesn't vanish out of the fruit cells just because they have been broken open (if indeed they were), surely the 'loose' fibre would just be floating around in the liquid and would therefore still be drunk?

Fructose, sucrose, lactose etc all become the same thing eventually when your body breaks it down - glucose (which, incidentally, your brain needs as a good source). So blending fruit cant somehow transform fructose into glucose as it hasn't been digested by the relevant enzymes etc. Unless your blender can mush fruit down on a molecular level (it would have to be a reeeally good one for that!)

I concede that the sugar would be absorbed faster into the blood stream but I just don't buy the rest of it Or is my fundamental understanding of food and science just totally wrong?

What happened to '5 a day' ?

That's fruit and veg. And should be mostly veg.

In eg Australia it's 5+2 - 5 veg, 2 fruit, which is more sound based on what bodies actually need.

I think fruit juice can be worse because it has. Itching left of any value! As in the fruit is squashed and the skin/segmenty bits are removed. There are different sorts though, smooth, from concentrate etc.

And yes, in moderation I think it's all fine but seriously, thousands of households think that ribena is a healthy portion of fruit and in a baby's bottle it's even better so I guess by going hard over on "while fruit is the only way" it may compensate for those and allow some people to make their own minds up after having done some research.
It sounds patronising but part of my job tries to address health inequality and it's shocking some days. I'm happy to be patronising if it can address some of the dietary anomalies that school children have.

But it's "at least" 5 a day.
Also, as people have said above, you can put veg in smoothies not that I do, but then I don't have one every day - just every now and then when I realise I've not eaten any fruit for a while

Unlike glucose, fructose (sugar in fruit) is only metabolised in the liver and excess fructose is turned into fat.

I think the link between fructose and obesity is more to do with corn syrup as a sweetening agent than too many apples. However, too much fruit (much more likely in smoothies) increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease.

The NHS says:

Q: Do juices and smoothies count towards my 5 A DAY?
A: Unsweetened 100% fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies can only ever count as a maximum of one portion of your 5 A DAY.
For example, if you have two glasses of fruit juice and a smoothie in one day, that still only counts as one portion.
Your combined total of drinks from fruit juice, vegetable juice and smoothies should not be more than 150ml a day – which is a small glass.
For example, if you have 150ml of orange juice and 150ml smoothie in one day, you'll have exceeded the recommendation by 150ml.
When fruit is blended or juiced, it releases the sugars which increases the risk of tooth decay so it's best to drink fruit juice or smoothies at mealtimes.

I might be wrong here, but it sounds like you are imagining fibre as a chemical of some sort when it isn't. Fibre is bulk, ie. the bulky stuff that your stomach can't break up to mush. It stays bulky in your stomach, collects water and helps to carry waste through the intestines.
The stringy bits of fruit are the fibres. They stay stringy throughout digestion to help the pooing process.
If you nutribullrt the fruit, that benefit is gone as the bulk is all mashed up, something our stomach can't do.

It doesn't sound patronising. But, ribena isn't a fruit juice.

Ofgurls - thanks, that is helpful. I'm not imagining fibre as a chemical, just being unclear what the cell walls would be doing if you juiced them. It seems to me that a juicer will usually break your fruit into something quite pulpy, but with more fibre in than something like a fruit juice. It will be less pulpy than a chewed apple, and about the same as fruit puree.

And all of those things - smoothie, puree, an apple - have some fibre in them.

Sure, you shouldn't rely on smoothies for your entire intake of anything, but I cannot understand how they'd be totally devoid of fibre.

I know this LRD and so do you and so do many people around the country. Unfortunately lots of people don't. Or claim not to. And give it to their children before they even have teeth. Instead of fruit. Because it's easier than peeling a banana etc.

The message about smoothies not = fruit is designed for people who don't have access to the opinions / arguments / facts you might usually read about when making decisions about your diet and your children's diets. I'm unsung "you" as nationwide plural here.
The message has to be simple and with as few caveats as possible from a population based health perspective to ensure that it gets into as many households as possible and isn't confusing.

Oh, ok, that makes sense.

So - basically - is it still ok to have smoothies if you're not glugging them by the pint/feeding them to your toddler in a bottle?