Based onthis thread the idea that fruits are healthy while soda is not came up alot.
I am somewhat confused. i thought fruit was basically sugar water (fruit is about 70% water and all the calories are from fructose), making it no different than sugar waters like Hi-C or Soda. So why is fruit considered healthy while Hi C or soda, which have about 10x as many calories per $ are not? Is it because fruits have vitamins? Is Fructose a better sugar than sucrose? I thought all sugar was broken down into glucose in the body anyway.
It depends a lot on the fruit. It’s simply not true to say that fruit are 70% water and all the calories are from fructose. Bananas for example contain moderate amounts of starch, and can be primarily starch depending on ripeness and variety. Avocados contain a lot of oils. Coconuts contain a lot of oils and protein. Fibre content in fruit varies, and in some fruits is extremely high.
Most fruits have fructose as their main sugar. Incidentally, so do drinks like mountain dew. Sodas have ‘high fructose corn syrup’ as their main sugar.
As far as i can tell, Hi-C or mountain dew taken with a daily vitamin & fiber supplement is ten times cheaper and better tasting than fruit and just as healthy.
You can of course get most things via supplement if you wish. This doesn’t only apply to fibre and vitamins. It applies to protein, fats and anyting else. So why pick on fruit?
Why eat meat? You can buy protein poweder for far less than the cost of meat.
Why eat vegetables?
Why eat anything? If your sole argument is cost then you would be living on riceflour, soy powder, metamucil and pills.
Then we can introduce the next problem. Do you do live on riceflour, soy powder, metamucil and pills ? Would you do it? I doubt it very much. Humans like food. If you don’t eat fruit/vegetables then you are going ot be eating somehting else. It’s a reasonably safe bet that the something else will be higher in saturated fats, cholesterol, sugar or the other nasties than fruit is. Humans evolved to be largely frugivorous.We can cope with huge quantities of fruit without any danger of health problems. This isn’t true of other foods by and large.
In summary: you gotta eat something, and fruit is probably the best thing.
The next problem is again linked to the fact that humans evolved primarily as frugivores. We extract a lot of vitamins micronutrients from plants. A lot of these things we don’t even know about yet, so we can’t produce them as supplements. The role of folate deficiency in promoting birth defects is a classic example from recent times. Women can now take folate supplements, but 15 years it wasn’t even known that they should. However a high fruit diet would have avoided the problem. The safest option in diet is to eat a wide variety of foods and leave the body to extract what it needs. Supplements can only possibly supplment the things we know that we need. Science has along way to go in divining all those things.
I’m eating the most delicious piece of cantaloupe right now - yum! Nice, deep orange color, sweet, interesting crunchy texture, yet soft, with a nice fragrance… I could have eaten the whole thing for dinner.
Should fruit be considered a healthfood compared to sodas and/or an item people on a budget should buy instead of soda. On the other thread people were saying fruit was healthy while soda was not and that people on a budget should buy fruit instead of soda.
Since fruit seems like it is nothing more than solid sugar water, and i’m guessing some mountain dew taken with a fiber supplement and a multi-vitamin would provide the same calories & vitamins/minerals for 1/10 the price then no, fruit is not healthy compared to junk food nor a good idea for poor people.
Calc, you’re not comparing apples to apples (no pun intended…really!).
If you are going to compare Mountain Dew + fiber + vitamin with whole fruits, you must compare the exact ingredients and quantities of same to have any type of valid information.
IANA nutritionist, but I would WAG that the volume of sugar in a 12oz can of Dew is much higher than in an orange. The concentration of sugars is one of the reasons that orange juice isn’t as healthy as eating an orange.
Additionally, have you completely forgotten about the amount of caffeine in Dew? You simply aren’t getting the same nutrients in your comparison.
i think you meant ‘i dare you’, so i will ask any of them here. However, i want an honest, non-status quo oriented reply about the nutritional and economic superiority of fruits over soda and supplements. I’ve already answered the budget question though. Mountain dew plus a vitamin & fiber is much cheaper than fruit.
PS, fruit is sugar water. Fruits are about 70-90% water, and almost all their calories come from sugar/fructose. No different than mountain dew, which is liquid and all its calories come from ‘high fructose corn syrup’.
Fair enough, maybe it is just my locality, but I dispute the assertion that soda+supplement is cheaper than fruit(particularly when fruit can be obtained for free in many cases).
Aside from that, maybe people on a budget should do what they feel most comfortable with; speaking for myself, if budget was an issue I’d rather go without television and my computer before I gave up fresh fruit - a regime of soda and supplements would be bad for me because it would make me miserable.
I can’t totally disagree. I always found it a bit absurd for instance, that Andrew Weil would tell you to avoid high fructose corn syrup containing beverages, and in the same breath tell you to eat more fruit. That said, fruits supply things you wouldn’t get with the alternative: Rutin, bioflavinoids, polyphenols, etc.
The question is somewhat vague in that “fruit” covers a lot of different stuff and “you” implies we all have the same physiology.
To me, I think the big difference is reverence. We would eat a lot less meat if we did the hunting and slaughtering ourselves. By the same token, there is something holy about peeling an orange or a banana. We are more contemplative of our consumption of raw unprocessed produce. If you come in hot after mowing the lawn, you might suck down 200 calories of Dew in under 30 seconds. Ahh. Refreshing convenience. An ice cold orange might leave you just as satisfied but take 10 minutes and give you half the calories. And as someone already mentioned, fruits in season or indiginous to your area may work out cheaper.
I always thought we ate fruit because fructose is naturally sweeter than glucose, meaning that you’d take in less calories while still experiencing the same amount of sweetness.
And I say this while eating an apple. A small, shiny, red, so-sweet-it-hurts, crisp ‘n’ juicy apple.
So funny because I bet there are a lot of people out there who would do that if they could.