I’m basically putting down the cookies in favor of things like oranges, apples and bananas etc…
I get that fruit is loaded with vitamins which makes it good for you. What I don’t get is why is the sugar in fruit LESS bad for you than the sugar you would find in a batch of cookies?
Also, can’t eating lots of fruit make you gain weight just as quickly as regular junk food?
For the record, this is more or less my daily intake of fruit intake:
Breakfast: A banana and a glass of V8 fusion (half veg half fruit juice)
lunch: turkey breast sandwich/ chips
Snack between lunch and dinner: An apple or an orange
Dinner: (Varies)
after dinner snack: grapes
The anti-sugar guy says that its the fiber that is in the fruit that makes a difference. So fruit juice would be just as bad, but eating whole fruit gives you fiber in addition to the sugar and that mitigates the negative effect of the sugar.
I don’t know if he is right or not, but that’s what the anti-sugar guy says.
The second is partly a direct result of the first – the fiber makes you feel a little more full, so you stop eating sooner. The fiber is also good for your digestive tract in general, of course.
Also, less fat in fruit than in chocolate chip cookies, and I believe low-fat diets are still considered healthier.
Not that important, but there are some vitamins and such in fruit, which you’re not getting from a cookie.
Anyway, my guideline is that either a stomachache or the runs is too much fruit, but other than that, knock yourself out. (I mean, be sure to get enough protein, and vitamin D, etc., too, of course). Oh, and best eating change you can make is to cut out the chips at lunch. Nothing but fat and empty calories, there.
This is one area where I think our friends in Australia have it more righter than we do here. They don’t consider “Fruits and Vegetables” to be one group in the Dietary Guidelines. Which makes sense. Fruits and Vegetables aren’t nutritionally equivalent. Their groups are Fruits (one group) and Vegetables and Legumes (t’other group). Current daily recommendations for an adult man (19-50 years) are 2 servings of Fruits and 6 servings of Vegetables and Legumes.
But if you’re replacing cookies with fruit, I wouldn’t sweat it much, at least not at this stage. It’s an improvement. Could it be improved further by swapping out vegetables for some of your fruits? Sure. But baby steps…
All fruit is not the same: you can eat berries ALL DAY: they are mostly water. Bananas, on the other hand, add up pretty quickly, as do grapes. Apples and oranges are in the middle.
The more you fruit, the more you toot. The more you toot, the better you feel. So eat your fruit with every meal.
(yeah I know that’s not how it’s supposed to go but so what. And I actually don’t think fruit should necessarily be eaten at every meal, either.)
There is no such thing as too much fruit. Maybe bananas but I hate bananas and never eat them. I can and do usually eat a minimum of ten pieces of fruit a day (“pieces” meaning an apple, an orange, a bunch of grapes, a small carton of berries). The limiting factors are my tooth enamel and diarrhea (neither is a problem normally). If I don’t have fruit at every meal plus snacks I start to die.
My layman guess, is it’s got something to do with the Glycemic Index (GI) and its relationship with insulin sensitivity.
AFAIK, table sugar is set to be the standard (scoring in at 100). Then other foods are just compared with the table sugar; like how much slower or faster the sugars from it enters the bloodstream.
Not sure what you have against bananas Manda Jo and Ulfreida.
One large banana - about 120 calories, no fat, 4 grams of fiber, and 17 grams of sugar. If not too ripe a solid source of resistant starch, which like fiber slows digestion, keeps you full a long time, and feeds beneficial gut bacteria.
One large apple - about 115 calories, no fat, 5 grams of fiber, and 23 grams of sugar.
One Subway chocolate chip cookie - about 220 calories, 10 grams of fat, 1 gram of fiber, and 18 grams of sugar.
You’d have to make a serious effort to overeat fruit, including bananas. They tend to satisfy. Fill up on a few bananas and you won’t be hungry for a while. Cookies? They tend to be easily eaten on top of already being not hungry and there is always room for just one more.
Free eating bananas (or grapes) will prevent me from losing weight. I can certainly eat enough bananas to fill up any calorie deficit I might have. That’s much harder to do with berries.
What works for you works for you. And berries are very low calorie and high fiber as well as high in all kinds of other phytochemical good stuff; no question they rock. Nevertheless few would mindlessly scarf down a large bunch of bananas (and they do not add up any quicker than apples, for example). OTOH many would offhandedly eat a box of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies without even realizing it until they saw there were no more. And they’d still be hungry for the next meal.
The smell and texture. Gives me shivers just thinking about it. I have bananaphobia. Although there are other foods I won’t eat (mussels, asparagus, raw egg) because I just don’t like the taste or texture, I’m only afraid of bananas. I realize they are a healthy food.
Short answer is that too much fruit can be a problem.
If you insist on eating a lot of fruit, choose low sugar counts and balance it with a higher ratio of vegetables.
Use a Glycemic chart to identify which fruits have the most fructose.
And don’t eat them before bed.
