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?

Really? Today I've had strawberries, a banana and a nectarine for lunch. A nectarine for an afternoon snack and a peach for pudding. I'm pretty healthy for my age. People jump on any bandwagon don't they? The fruit shaming is one of them.

@Cherrynib, yes, the chemical make up of white sugar (which is glucose and fructose) is the same as the fructose and glucose sugars in fruit (most fruit has proportionally much more fructose) but unlike white sugar fruit is not just sugars but includes fibre and vitamins, antixoxidants etc The fibre slows down the absorption of the sugars. They are not like for like in nutritional value.

As others have said it’s not fruit that is making people fat.

Neither today nor yesterday, but back when I was pg with DD4 I had gestational diabetes.

My midwife referred me to a dietician to sort out a diet regimen that would help me keep the GD under control. I followed the diet religiously and avoided the need for insulin. DD was born healthy and quite the bouncing baby at 9lbs 1oz.

Anyhow, I recall very specific instructions about fruit. No more than 12 grapes a day and only if no other fruit was included in that day's intake was one particular instruction. There was a similar instruction for baby carrots. Other fruits and veg also had clear instructions.

Mind you, there was also a per meal limit for cheese, yogurt, butter, milk (only fat free allowed), mayonnaise, dressings, and meats, plus of course bread, pasta, rice, potatoes and anything else you might include in a normal diet.

However, I think this illustrates that you can't just mainline fruit and assume nothing negative will happen.

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

I too so agree with this, temples are even involved - the body!

Pallisers - agree 100% about utterly bland American food - not just fruit but every single sort of food. My DCs realised with great joy the last time we were all in Ireland that pork had a taste. I had never seen them lick their plates before.

The diet for a diabetic is good, but there are all kinds of natural foods that people with diabetes can't eat that are good for us.

math, I don't think all american food is bland - just the fruit in supermarkets. Local farm food is lovely. Our local mexian and chinese and japanese markets are brilliant. I find the meat good and the fish and shellfish excellent if you buy from the right place.

I do miss the many varieties of potatoes but you can buy them from seed online (I am thinking of planting this year). Last time I was back in Ireland for the new potato season they didn't taste as nice as I remember from my childhood either.

I think the best tasting food is the food of childhood. The next best is food straight from the source. mackeral given away by kids fishing all day in the summer, served with chips from the chipper - food of the gods.

But I will say that those strawberries in kent - I have never tasted anything like them, even back in Ireland picked from the strawberry plant. The first homegrown tomato I ever ate straight from a garden, was also in southern England and I can still remember that taste explosion in my mouth. Don't think I have ever had another like it.

@CoughLaughFart there is no difference. Ask any dietician (not a fucking 'nutritionist' twat).

Sugar is sugar. Doesnt matter if it has vitamins or nutrients. Moderation, for all of it. Especially with modern fruit that is mostly hybrids and made to be even sweeter.

Pallisers - my dad was an avid gardener. By that I mean we never bought fruit or vegetables, or jam. The only fruits we bought were oranges and other citrus fruits. We even stopped while out driving somewhere if someone spotted mushrooms in a field. Relatives with farms supplied potatoes, eggs, and a free range Christmas turkey every year. After dad had a stroke and couldn't keep up the garden mum bought fruit and veg. They all had their own individual clear taste. My DCs were astounded.

I have had this conversation with Russian friends of mine who were also greatly disappointed with the blandness (and also puzzled at the weird sweetness of breads).

math we also had fruit trees and veg from the garden - apples, raspberries, lettuce, spring onions, potatoes etc. At the moment, I never buy lettuce -just pick it from my neighbor's garden that she makes available to all of us who live nearby. Ditto rhubarb, basil, mint, rosemary, thyme, parsley and peas. When we moved here an elderly Italian neighbour (he spoke no english) would drop off paper bags of home grown tomatoes to us every couple of days.

I think home/locally grown has a better taste but I don't think this is exclusive to Ireland. I'm sorry if all the farm food near you is bland. It really isn't near me.

I do think things tasted better when I was a child though - not sure why. And I also think some things taste better in some places - kent for strawberries, new potatoes in Ireland, oranges off the tree in Florida etc.

@Cherrynib, yes, the chemical make up of white sugar (which is glucose and fructose) is the same as the fructose and glucose sugars in fruit

Thank you. That is the point I was arguing, in response to PP complaining about people who are "too stupid to know the difference" between the sugar in fruit and the sugar in sweets.

While we’re talking about food in America, I will say that when I lived there I lost weight. I couldn’t get a taste for any of my usual comfort foods. Tried in vain to find a brand of chocolate that made me crave more - nothing. Fruit bland and tasteless. Bread - appalling. We started buying bagels because at least you knew bagels should be a little bit sweet so it wasn’t such a strange taste. Meat? Just seemed cheap and over processed.

I lost a stone in a year without trying at all.

Disclaimer: not slagging off America, I’m a big fan generally but am amazed how there are so many obese people when the food is so bad! 😂

@RomeoBunny, you tagged coughlaughfart, but I can’t see such a poster on here so wondering whether you were replying to me?

Ok @Cherrynib :)

people in america who are obese are generally eating processed food and are encouraged to eat constantly and in public - same reason people in UK and Ireland are getting fatter and fatter.

Saying food in the US is awful is like going to a cheap supermarket in the UK, buying turkey twizlers and saying food in the UK is awful. There is a range. Most people I know buy local and are conscious of the sugar thing that started this thread. Most times when I go to people's house for dinner I get lovely healthy food.

I would like to point out it isn't just Fad science telling us to limit sugar in take. There is good biological reason too. It heavily linked to ageing pathways and links to our insulin response pathways (which affects tissue growth as well as glucagon storage).
Fruit is high in sugar. In moderation it is okay but you still shouldn't exceed your daily sugar amount just because it's fruit. Keep a close eye. A lot of the 'goodness' found in fruit is also found in veg. And veg has the added benefit of not screwing up your teeth (if you drink juice drink it through a straw).

This picture explains the diff between sugars quite well. Fruit is important but not too much of it. Simple really.

As in it's free sugars we should beware. Sugar that is not contained within a cellular structure, like fruit. Sugars that are too easily bioavailbale, ie sugar that is added to drinks or already broken down in juices. That's the stuff that's a problem.

"The ratios of fructose and glucose are pretty much the same in both fruit and table sugar"

Statements like this are so simplistic. Unlike table sugar, fruit is also packaged with helpful vitamins, fibre, flavanoids and even a little protein as well as the much-maligned sugars.

On the useful chart I agree but oige, for some of us we can over eat on the free to eaqt fruit - i have been known to eat 8 bananas a day. As I can't do them in moderation I've just found it better to stock up on lovely veg instead. However I doubt there is another mumsnetter who would eat 8 bananas a day so I may just be a special category.

Swnlife is right. Just keep it in moderation. If you can't you can get all you get from fruit from veg perfectly easily so no one is forced to have fruit actually at all. i do have quite a thick blackberry hedge here and do pick from that every afternoon in the autumn but that's just once a year in season. Those are wild blackberries in my hedge.

Right, so if you eat a bag of haibo you get no actual nutrients in that other than sugar carbohydrate. If you ate fruit you may well be getting the same amount of sugar but it has so much more nutrition with different vitamins and minerals and fibre. There’s no comparison from a nutrition point of view.

The government say your fruit and veg intake should be predominantly veg rather than fruit. I worry I eat too much fruit as most days I would have, for example, a banana, a pear, an apple, a small bowl of berries, a sprinkle of dried fruit. But then I don’t eat cakes or biscuits etc or anything processed with sugar in so I figure that balances it out, and I get a lot of goodness in the fruit I eat.

That sounds very sensible, Yule. i could eat fruit until the cows come home (and easily 1000 calories of dried fruit at a sitting - i remember my 6 foot son who would like to get up to 10 stone (!!!!) and I both wanting to swap stone with each other and last summer looking at what he eats (not much, not that interested in food, often just doesn't remember to eat a meal) and suggesting just copying my then fruit, dried fruit and nut habit where you can fairly easily ad 1000 calories without even thinking. For those with no weight issues and eating a bit of regular fruit it is very good for you. it is when you replace a meal with masses and masses of fruit you can get a sugar high and crash and are hungry soon after so after the bag of nuts and raisins and before you know it another 1000 calories in you. Whereas people tend not to over eat on vegetables and good fats quite so easily as they aren't spiked up and then crash down -it's all a lot more even keel. Although my ancestors who only ate 45 potatoes a day and nothing else (Ireland 1800s) certainly must have had a lot of carbs but I suppose they had vast amounts of exercise too.

It's funny how often you mention your ancestors who' only ate 45 potatoes a day and nothing else' Xenia. I wonder how such a piece of family history gets passed down the generations?

i don't want to bore anyone with it. I've been working on my family tree. Some of them left Ireland after the famine - that's all. I only found about the 45 potatoes on line actually. Lots of places seem to mention it and i think the potato is the reason the Irish population rose from 1m to 8m very quickly and sadly (although it's a very political issue) at least in part caused 1m to die and 1m to emigrate.

"On a typical day in 1844, the average adult Irishman ate about 13 pounds of potatoes. At five potatoes to the pound, that's 65 potatoes a day. The average for all men, women, and children was a more modest 9 pounds, or 45 potatoes." www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2001/03/putting_all_your_potatoes_in_one_basket.html?via=gdpr-consent

Perhaps I should look into the diet on Orkney in the 1700s where I had some other relatives. I expect that was a lot of seabird eggs.

"The foods, menus, history and folklore of Scottish domestic culture are celebrated with a robust affection and pride that are delightfully infectious in Florence Marian McNeill’s The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore and Recipes. McNeill first published The Scots Kitchen in 1929, with the aim of commemorating and extolling the Scots national tradition as expressed in its regional gastronomical heritages that she, even by the start of the last century, feared might be lost forever “in this age of standardization.”

McNeill was born in 1885 in Orkney, the archipelago of islands just north of Scotland, at a time when the previous century of Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions had wrought their stark and sometimes brutal dislocations and disruption of the ancient Scots traditions in social and domestic life. Her early years on the islands helped to shape her life-long fascination and pride in Scottish history and cultural traditions. Later in her life she produced a four-volume history of Scottish customs, folklore and ancient festivals called The Silver Bough, today considered an essential source by historians in the field.

The Scots Kitchen evokes the era before the forced pace of social change brought about by industrialization, and conjures the image of the self-sufficient farmstead, and within, the capable mistress at the helm of her bubbling cauldrons and sizzling “girdles” over the peat fire. McNeill generously interlards the many old recipes with historical, literary and contemporary commentaries that animate the period, as well as provide a constant social context for the heritage of the recipes and menus.

Speaking of the period pre-dating the Agrarian Revolution (which spanned roughly 1750 to 1850) McNeill paints the scene of the early Scot amid the gifts of his homeland: “In olden times, when the population was small and sparse—by the beginning of the sixteenth century it did not exceed half a million—the means of sustenance were on the whole plentiful. The moors and forests abounded with game; elsewhere ‘herds of kye nocht tame’ with flesh ‘of a marvelous sweetness, of a wonderful tenderness, and excellent delicateness of taste’ ranged the hills. Rivers, lochs, and seas teemed with fish. Sheep were valued mainly for their wool, cows for their milk. Butter and cheese were in use in the earliest times and the oat and barley crops have always provided the staple bread.”

I agree with you op fruit is fine and very good for you.

its natures candy

And should be treated like candy. It’s loaded with sugar and acid, so should be eaten in small amounts. There are plenty of veggies that will provide you with vitamins, minerals and fibre without corroding your teeth and sending your insulin levels through the roof.