Why are people so down on fruit these days?

[2up2manydown]

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?

I eat a very low sugar diet, however I do eat strawberries as they are fairly low in sugar. Only one or two small servings a day though. I don't touch super sweet fruit like banana or pineapples.

Much fruit has been bred to be sweeter than it naturally would be. Think how tart wild berries are.

Fat vs sugar is a silly argument because we NEED a lot more fat than sugar. The body can make more glucose if it needs to.

robo that's a bit like someone saying smoking can't be bad because they smoked for years and don't have lung cancer/copd.
Fruit, if it's your only source of sugar and you have a healthy diet and are active and don't have a metabolic disorder then no it probably won't harm you at all and yes it does contain nutrients, but vegetables are even healthier and many people eat more fruit than vegetables when it should be the other way around.

Bag of 5 apples 90p
groceries.asda.com/product/apples/asda-farm-stores-apples-colour-and-variety-may-vary/910003095036

Bag of 5 bananas 90p

groceries.asda.com/product/bananas/asda-growers-selection-ready-to-eat-bananas/910000222653

Utter tosh that fruit is difficult to afford. £1.80 for 10 pieces of fruit.

I think it’s more juicing fruit than while fruit. Juicy my fruit means you don’t get the bulk of the food by a lot of sugar and acid. Keep eating the whole fruit!

Whole, fresh fruit is fine. Ok veg is probably better but my dc will eat a wider variety of fruit (any except grapefruit) than veg (youngest - tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, peas, broccoli only) so it tends to be 3 or 4 fruit portions and 2 or 3 veg in our house.

Dried fruit like raisins and pure fruit juice is however mostly sugar and raisins do get stuck in teeth. Tooth decay can lead to heart failure if not detected early enough so is not just a minor inconvenience.

www.diabetes.co.uk/blog/2015/09/sugar-carbs-fruits-most-least/
Bananas are very high in sugar while berries are pretty low and they also have more antioxidants. Not all fruit is equal.

Do posters really think that all the fat people waddling around have overindulged in pineapples? See, I’d bet my house it’s more likely to be fried food, baked goods and confectionary.

@Gammeldragz except obese people aren't filling their plates with fruit ...

‘Wellness’ has replaced religion and taken on a lot of its trappings (rituals, forbidden items, living the ‘right’ way will allow you to avoid death, etc). The current sugar-phobia is the latest manifestation of this.

For a sensible view of the current wellness/clean eating fad by an actual food expert, see the book The Angry Ched by Anthony Warner.

Chef, not Ched...

@Birdsgottafly

"Is Sugar From Fruit Better For You Than White Sugar?

The Answer: Whether it’s in a piece of fruit, your soda or a pastry, sugar is made up of the same two components: fructose and glucose. The molecular structure and composition of sugar molecules is the same no matter where they come from.

The ratios of fructose and glucose are pretty much the same in both fruit and table sugar. Most fruits are 40 to 55 percent fructose (there’s some variation: 65 percent in apples and pears; 20 percent in cranberries), and table sugar (aka sucrose) is 50/50.

Joy Dubost, R.D., is a nutritionist, food scientist and a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics."

2up your right, people don’t get obese from eating too many pineapples, they get obese from eating too much fat and not exercising enough.

This evening I have eaten a whole melon and loads of strawberries (my garden is producing a punnet a day), I’m sure this is healthier than eating a bar of dairy milk or a slice of cheesecake. Yes fruit can be bad for your teeth but not if you brush them twice a day.

Not to long ago a farmer/fruit merchant was prosecuted as Two of his workers had been killed, they had climbed into one of these fruit storage silos and suffocated as there was no oxygen, just some kind of gas used to delay ripening.

And sorry to say, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are actually fruit (they have seeds inside them), a lot of veg contain sugar and/or carbs, nothing’s safe

When DD2 was 3 or 4 she went through a picky eating phase. Basically she ate nothing except meat and fruit, regardless of what we offered her. You have never seen such a healthy looking child; she absolutely glowed.

At Christmas she played Mary in the school nativity. Most of the kids had that pale peaky run down midwinter look. DD looked like an otherworldly being, she shone with health.

It made me reassess what constitutes a healthy diet to be honest.

I can believe that Tinkly, a healthy diet consists of things that grow or roam (meat, veg and fruit), the rest of the crap in the supermarkets we don’t really need.

BIWI I was trying to keep my carbs under 20g a day so that really only allowed a few bits of salad and not much more.

There’s nothing wrong with fruit per se. I think the problem comes when people take the “X number of portions of fruit and veg a day” rule (I’m using X because it varies so widely but is it 5 in the UK?) and then eat five portions of fruit and call it job done. It’s so much healthier to get most of the daily portions from vegetables. Also loaded with nutrients but far less sugar and fewer carbs and more fibre (dependent on vegetables chosen of course). On smoothie bottles and some fruit juice bottles these are listed as counting towards one of the daily portions but actually they’re just loaded with sugar and all the fibre is pretty much gone. I don’t think we should be removing fruit but eating it in moderation (like everything). It shouldn’t be used as a substitute for daily vegetable portions imo.

Oh no @Lovemusic33 !
I knew tomatoes were fruit obviously but cucumbers and peppers too! That might explain why they are popular with my dc.

Apparently peas are fruit too (I google too much) ,my dd loves peas and cucumber though I’m sure cucumber isn’t sweet.

fruit is not bad its good for you, yes it has sugar but its a natural sugar, if its teeth that are the concern the advice is to drink juice from a straw, rinse mouth with water after eating it, dont suck on acidic fruit like lemon for long to keep from softening enamel, eat a piece of cheese after or chew sugar free gum to get saliva to rinse away the sugar from teeth and don't brush teeth until at least 30 mins after eating, that means anything actually not just fruit. 5 a day is a minimum and as part of a healthy balanced diet fruit and veg are great for you in lots of ways... enjoy. I do and both my boys did growing up, neither have had either a filling or an extraction, but then I was the mum who limited processed sugary stuff and gave fruit as a snack.

‘Wellness’ has replaced religion and taken on a lot of its trappings (rituals, forbidden items, living the ‘right’ way will allow you to avoid death, etc). The current sugar-phobia is the latest manifestation of this.

Absolutely! I've posted on MN before about diet being the new religion - complete with schisms/indulgences/sins/demonisation/ eternal life. Only waiting for the holy wars to begin.

Children aren't being admitted to hospital from tooth decay caused by eating too many pineapples.

Children aren't obese from eating too many bananas

People who carefully dole out their strawberry allowance for the day are ... only met on MN.

My kids don't eat as much fruit anymore because it is so hard to find stuff that tastes like real fruit. The strawberries in the supermarket here in the US - even whole foods - taste like nothing. Local farmer's markets produce better stuff. My 3 have yet to taste anything like the strawberries we had on a holiday in Kent a few years ago. They would each eat a punnet as an appetiser before dinner. They still talk about how wonderful they tasted.

As part of a balanced, varied diet, fruit is absolutely fine. I can’t believe this is actually being argued. Fruit is not making us (general) fat. Processed food and over consumption of those foods is.

For anyone interested in nice, evidence based, non hysterical nutrition, there’s a great new podcast by the Food Doctor. Lots of evidence based information and discussion especially the latest episode.

I remember a thread on here a few months ago, posted by a woman who couldn't understand why she wasn't losing weight. She posted her daily diet and it included large amounts of nuts, avocados and fatty meats. She was told that in order to lose weight, all she had to to was to give up her daily handful of blueberries- it was all that sugar which was the real problem