Comment by Normal_gaussian
9 years ago
Sugar that occurs naturally in foods are often complex. Complex sugars are larger molecules that can be broken into simple sugars (lactose, fructose, glucose).
There is actually very little sugar in fruit, and they are full of vitamins and minerals which are good for you.
If you cut artificial (added sugar) foods from your diet you will likely find that other foods taste sweeter as your taste becomes more sensitive.
> There is actually very little sugar in fruit
Whoever told you this did you a disservice, because it's completely untrue. I think coke is a pretty good posterchild for "a shocking amount of sugar", and an 8 oz bottle of coke has about the same sugar content as an apple or a navel orange (and the orange has half the calories, making the comparison even less favorable). The difference between the two is that the coke is (nutritionally speaking) nothing but carbonated, liquid sugar while a whole apple comes with a fair amount of fiber. The difference in speed of absorption is primarily what makes one healthy and the other terrible for you.
You are mostly right. The mostly part is this:
gram for gram Apples and coke are about the same, however an 8oz coke has over twice the sugar content of an apple.
Secondly, on the disservice, you are particularly correct. I have done myself a disservice by not correctly interpreting my own research. Two years back, when switching to become a vegetarian, I calculated macros for loads of foods. For sugar I used a calculation based on the food's glycemic index.
That's was what I was getting at in general: glycemic index is far more relevant than gross sugar content[1]. But my criticism still stands: It's good that that's what you yourself use GI (as do I), but it's misleading and inaccurate to phrase a low GI as "very little sugar". It's particularly confusing for those readers of your comment who might not be familiar with GI. Instead of falsely claiming that fruit has little sugar as a roundabout way of describing it's GI, instead one can say: "Fruit has plenty of sugar, but the attendant fiber content makes the absorption of said sugar better for you than mainlining it as liquid Coke".
As an aside, where are you getting your nutritional info? It's way off what I've found. I was using the nutritional info for a regular "medium apple", and in the sources I found it has 20g vs coke's 25g, and almost the exact same amount of calories. 80% of a coke's sugar, calorie-forcalorie and serving-for-serving, hardly qualifies ad "very little sugar".
I couldn't say this more. I had to cut everything[1] except raw food (meat, carrots, tomatos, salad) and it's true that within a few days you start to feel the sugar in these even in small forms. You also recognize how sugary processed food is, and how it affect your mind.
In all honesty since I was able to eat anything again, I surrendered to a junk food from time to time. I know how to keep it small; but I have to admit how hard is it when your body allows it.
[1] my brain / heart / veins reacted wrong to any fat, sugar, too much salt.. so I was highly driven into avoiding them. That made the need for will power irrelevant at the time. A bonus.
The word fructose comes from the word fruit, it literally means the sugar found in fruits. Most fruits have more fructose than other sugars. A banana has 14 grams of sugar, equivalent to 4 teaspoons of table sugar. If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it. You can argue that it's ok to eat fruit because it's balanced by the fiber and vitamins, but that's equivalent to saying that fructose is ok in moderation. Which seems to go against the current nutritional science understandings.
> If fructose is bad for you then fruits are bad for you, there's no way around it.
Actually fruits also have fiber which slows down the absorption of fructose. The way we digest fruits is different from the way we digest table sugar.
Beware reductionist thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism
Yes, and no. If you drink straight apple juice, yes, that's bad for you. If, however, you eat an apple, that's good for you. The Apple has plenty of fiber that keeps the body from absorbing the fructose too quickly. Straight apple juice kicks your pancreas into high gear.
Apple flesh is 2.6% fibre.
Where does this myth come from that fruit is high in fibre? It simply is not true. Some fruits are. Wild fruits certainly are. Domesticated table fruit is not. Google "fibre content of apple" if you don't believe me.
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> There is actually very little sugar in fruit
that's incorrect. in fact drinking a glass of orange juice is similar to drinking a coke. just because its fructose does not mean it's any better for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Yes, let me go and pick a glass of orange juice from my glass of orange juice tree.
http://thepaleodiet.com/fruits-and-sugars/
pretty far from little sugar.
I lol'd
That is largely because you need to squeeze more than one orange to get one glass of orange juice.