Why are people so down on fruit these days?

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Bursting with vitamins and enzymes and fibre, yet I’m reading more and more on Mumsnet and elsewhere about the insidious dangers of unbridled fruit consumption. A Mumsnetter once wrote that a poster way as well eat a bag of Haribo as juice up a load of fruit.

AIBU to think that a punnet of strawberries is still a pretty good thing to put in your body?

Fruit galore there. No weight / dental issues. Moderation is key. Antioxidant effect to better than haribos

I’d sooner have a few fillings than scurvy

Scurvy is extremely rare in the UK, whereas tooth decay is the most common reason children are admitted to hospital

Many people eat little or no fruit or veg and manage to dodge scurvy, due to the vitamin C in potatoes eaten as chips and tomato sauce on pizza.

Puppy, have you never heard of vegetables? Solves both the scurvy problem and the tooth decay. That is the tagline for the new advert screening on tv later this month.

How can a debate about fruit lead to one mumsnetter being horrible about another mumsnetter’s dc

No weight/dental issues do you even read newspapers?

whereas tooth decay is the most common reason children are admitted to hospital

And yet you read numerous threads on here where parents say their children don't want to brush their teeth and the overwhelming response is to let them play with a toothbrush Any suggestion of the parent insisting teeth are brushed is met with cries of child abuse.
Maybe it's that rather than fruit that is to blame.

My dentist told me that it is when you eat fruit/sugar that matters - if people graze on it all day they are likely to get cavities and enamel erosion because you have some sort of acid response to eating (she obviously explained this much better than I have!). If you stick to meal times, when this is happening anyway, then it is fine. Besides, fruit is hardly the worst thing you can eat - I often find that the anti-fruit people tend to be low carbers who quite merrily gobble up chorizo and other processed meats, which are known carcinogens (and fruit is full of antioxidants, which will help to repair the damage......).

I took my oldest to McDonalds yesterday and as I am trying to lose some weight I decided to have a bag of carrots and a bag of melon cubes, both 80g.

The melon had 3.8g of sugar and the carrot had 5.8g of sugar per bag. Does that mean I'm not allowed carrots anymore?

I really think that a lot of the kids teeth problem that is always on the news is due to fruit not fizzy drinks.
That said its good calories, its good sugar and its good for you! We just need to moderation and to eat it at the right times for teeth.

That all said, its too expensive for me! Although i did buy some strawberries the other day and they were delish

Ah, the MN orthorexics out in force again. Fruit is "naughty", christ on a bike! But then on MN people vilify veg like peas and sweetcorn for the same reason

Fruit is bloody brilliant. Loads of vitamins fibre, any of them low GI. So there's fructose in them? Our bodies need sugars to survive. far better to get it through natural, unprocessed sources like fruit than to eat refined, processed garbage.

Orthorexics? 😂😂

I think that it is wishful thinking that the news reports of teeth decay in children is due to excessive fruit consumption and not fizzy drinks/sweeties etc. People look for excuses to justify their choices. I think if teeth brushing was more thorough then the problems would decrease significantly.

Indeed. And amusingly, there’s two distinct groups of fruit related orthorexics. Firstly the ‘fruit is so wonderfully healthy, we eat it by the tonne’ and then the ‘fruit is full of sugar, I allow 4 blueberries when there’s an R in the month, no more’.

MN food threads are terrifying. The hyperbole is off the scale. I remember a thread where someone admitted feeding a child raisins aka ‘Satanic droppings’ as another poster put it. I think some of the more disordered posters thought there was a genuine risk that social services might get involved with that one...

Children's tooth decay is far more likely to be caused by toddlers / pre schoolers having baby bottles overnight (sometimes filled with juice), being given sweeties and chocolate several times a day and parents not brushing their teeth properly if at all.
It is not healthy children, with sensible parents, eating whole fruit as snacks.
Some children also just have genetically bad teeth / health issues causing decay.

Perhaps if children were given a banana or handful of blueberries when they were desperate for a snack when they got out of school, rather than crisps and sweets, it would be better all round?

My 16 year old DS are a huge punnet of cherries yesterday. He look at me like I was nuts if I said they were bad for him.

I think kids teeth are more in danger from constant snacking on fruit, than fruit per se. I am a child minder and have spent a lot of time at toddler groups and other child friendly places and a lot of parents seem to encourage constant snacking as long as the food is 'healthy' and they seem to spend almost the whole hour and a half grazing on berries. The children I mind would eat non stop if I let them, and their parents are fine with it as long as it's fruit. (I have minded for several families and they have all been like this). I don't like fruit myself but I would consider it a fresh, healthy, snack, but some people seem to consume bucket loads of the stuff.

MN is like a different world to the one I live in! Half the kids at school are met with share bags of crisps and Haribo for a snack - I think these are the kids heading for childhood obesity not the ones who have a few pieces of fruit a day. Not one parent I know stresses and analyses their kids diets to this extent, most just feed normal food and a few treats. I wouldn’t have a clue how many grams of sugar DS are yesterday, I just aim for a good variety of meals and plenty of water.

I would have thought that fructose and glucose would be processed identically by the body, so I was interested in the claims in this thread that there is a difference. I googled which was worst, and the first article to come up was against fructose.

So maybe it would be healthier to eat sugar out of a sugar bowl than get it from fruit? (Ignoring the other nutrients in fruit.)

Just thought I'd chuck that in.

universityhealthnews.com/daily/nutrition/is-fructose-bad-for-you-why-fructose-is-worse-than-sugar/

Fructose is the simple sugar that makes up 50 percent of table sugar (sucrose) which is typically made from sugar cane or beets. The other half of table sugar is glucose. And fructose makes up 55 percent of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Dr. Lustig’s latest paper, recently published in the medical journal Advances in Nutrition, explains why there is nothing empty about the calories in fructose and describes three ways in which fructose harms human health exclusive of its calories.[1]

Even though fructose and glucose are both sugars that make up table sugar, they act very differently in the body. While glucose is so essential for life that your body will manufacture it if needed, there is not even one human biochemical reaction that requires fructose from the diet. The only place in the body that fructose is physiologically necessary is in semen, and the fructose there is made by the body out of glucose.

Dr. Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist at UCSF’s Department of Pediatrics and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, wants you to know that fructose is very bad news. In published papers, speeches, and interviews over the past several years, he has been spreading the bad news about fructose and explaining how fructose is behind today’s worldwide epidemics of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and abnormal cholesterol.

But this is the thing, i don't see the overnight fruit juice drinks, or the fizzy drinks, or crisps and sweets after school. I do see constant grazing of fruit though. I know it will happen in some households, but its not what i see (and my area is not affluent).

Not all calories are equal and the calories in fruit are much better than the calories they aren't empty calories like sweets or crisps they are full of good stuff. But its everything in moderation

Apparently there was a huge problem with kids teeth after the government bought in the five-a-day rule - everyone went overboard thinking fruit was great but it's not if you have too much. I get fed up of parents all smug because their kids munch on fruit and raisins all day - it's not actually that good for them.

Similarly my children have a shocking amount of fruit but look like Boden advert children!

Hope that was tongue in cheek!!

Fructose is very damaging to health when consumed in excess. Two portions of fruit a day and no fizzy drinks, no ready made meals, and you'll be just fine. and brush your teeth of course - that should be obvious.
It's really not complicated.