I’ve hated fruits since I was a child, and haven’t eaten any for the last decade and a half or so. I can’t stand their texture or taste and I had some silly childhood trauma from them, so I refuse to eat any and pick them out of my food if they’re in there. That includes fruit-like vegetables (tomatoes, eggplant, avocado, etc.)
I do eat a lot of vegetables (I’m vegan), mostly cooked but occasionally in salads.
Am I going to die a horrible, contrafruitarian death?
No. Fruits don’t contain any nutrients you can’t get plenty of from other sources.
And IMO, since they have a low nutritional density and are sugary, most people would be better off eating less fruit, not more (doubly so if they drink fruit juice rather than eating whole fruit). Not that it’s not better than doughnuts or whatever…
I disagree with this. Most people don’t have very good diets to begin with; so to encourage them to eat more fruits in place of the less healthy things such as doughnuts or whatever (which have no nutritional value whatsoever) is a good thing.
You know, I’ve been hearing this a lot lately. Has the traditional wisdom changed recently? I was always taught they were supremely healthy, perhaps the healthiest foods in existence. Is that no longer accepted?
I’ve never heard them described quite that highly. But it is true that fruit is high in fructose; with some fruits being higher than others (pineapple, dates, bananas in particular are high in sugar) but they also contain fiber, antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. Fruit juice, OTOH, is stripped of most of these nutrients and is essentially sugar water.
Fruit does have a lot of sugar, but it also has a lot of good stuff, too, so if you’re going to be eating sweet things, it might as well be fruit. But then, there’s nothing that says you have to eat a lot of sweet stuff, as long as you’re getting enough Calories (hint: If you’re in the First World, you’re getting enough Calories).
It pretty much works for me, and I did at one point do an analysis of the type I recommended in the other thread: Add up the foods in a typical week and see how the nutrients come out. Vegetables really do have everything you can find in fruit if you’re eating the right combinations. I can’t exactly hold up my diet as a model of perfection, but I’m surely above average.
And it’s not that I never eat fruit… it’s just that mostly I like fruit cooked in things like pie, jam, etc. As a kid, I often requested something like a berry pie instead of a birthday cake because the berries have a better balance of sweet and acidity.
I understand the childhood trauma thing completely. My husband had one over oatmeal, and he won’t touch ANYTHING containing it. That is not something you can just brush aside.
If you are going to be vegetarian, then by gosh and golly, eat every vegetable in the Universe! Go to ethnic markets and look around. Take a notebook, and write down the names of the strange things you don’t recognize, then come home and look them up. Check out different ways to prepare them. Vegetables are treasure chests of minerals and fiber, and more vitamins than most folks realize.
And of course, make sure all your bread, pasta, and grains are whole grains.
~VOW
My husband is the same, down to the childhood trauma part. He eats no fruits whatsoever, with the single exception of banana bread. (I know that banana bread isn’t a fruit, but it is literally the only food he will eat that even incorporates fruit as an ingredient.) And he’s one of the healthiest people I know. He does eat a ton of vegetables, though.
I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering what these fruit/oatmeal traumatic childhood experiences were. I know it’s not really relevant, but… anyone care to share?
Hubster was a young kid in a family of MANY children. His grandmother served oatmeal for breakfast, and he didn’t like the taste and texture of it. She made him sit at the table ALL DAY until he ate it, and he had no other food at all that day.
~VOW
I think the first fruit-like thing I ever experienced was a really sour tomato that I was forced to have in kindergarten. From then on I pretty much associated “round and juicy” with “abject horror”.
And then I spent a summer with my uncle, who would chase me around his house with a toy plastic baseball bat trying to get me to eat my daily servings of fruit before I could go or do anything else. And whenever we went out for a hike, he’d bring along an apple and hover over me until I finished it to the core. All I wanted to do was walk and watch the damned deer, not be forced to tears at the thought of another disgusting apple.
It all seems pretty silly in hindsight, and I’m sure he meant well, but hey, I was like 6 or 7.
In adulthood, it’s just a taste thing and I can’t help but gag every time I taste a fruit-like substance. Besides, they’re diabetes-spreading evil plant babies, part of a massive evolutionary conspiracy. What other lifeform WANTS to be eaten? That’s just creepy.
Well, from a weight loss perspective, it’s a simple matter of calories per serving, same as everything else. A banana clocks in at about 100, while a cucumber only has 8. Similarly, an apple, again, has about 100, to 25 in a tomato. That kind of difference really adds up over the course of a week. Since I started watching my calorie intake, fruit is one of the things that I’ve had to cut back on. And yeah, that came as a surprise to me too.
Can you really categorically reject all fruit of any kind? It’s a pretty broad term, and includes many things that are pretty much the same as “vegetables” in texture and taste. Not all fruit is sweet and juicy. What if someone told you that your favorite “vegetable” were actually a “fruit”?
Also, to expand on my previous post: Another thing about eating fruit is that it’s rarely an ingredient in a regular meal, so if you eat them, it’ll likely be as dessert or as a snack. That means you’re getting those calories in addition to the calories from the proper stuff you eat. Cutting back on desserts and snacks is generally a good idea. Snacking certainly isn’t “free” just because you’re snacking on fruit instead of candy bars.
I have had similar discussions with my husband. All he can say is that it’s psychological in origin. I asked him pretty much this exact same question, and he shrugged and said he has no idea how he’d react, because this hasn’t come up. He thinks that there is at least a slight chance that he would start disliking the vegetable, knowing now that it was instead a fruit.