If you hate science and math, skip this blog.
Yes, that’s right.
Just read the title, believe it, and move on. For the rest of you, I will prove to you mathematically that the sugar in fruit bad for your health and yes fruit is in fact, evil.
Let’s begin with an ancient story where the evils of fruit tempted man.
Yes, I’m talking about Adam and Eve and the tree with the forbidden fruit. From the beginning of time, we’ve heard stories of Satan associated with fruit.
Well, that story lives on. Marketers taught Gen-Xers and Baby-Boomers that fruits are essential to living. “Without fruit, you will die.” It is not true.
Don’t get me wrong, like most sins; there’s a sweet, juicy, heavenly high that comes after a beautiful piece of fruit. Still, the math of your body chemistry proves that fruit is evil.
Let’s begin with a little experiment on your body.
Step 1) Go to your cupboard and find one of the most sugar-rich, sweetest substances you can. Look at the label, find the highest content of carbohydrates or sugars you can. Might I suggest a jar of jam, honey, or a stash of your favorite candy bar?
Step 2) Eat 2 cups full of that food right now. Your pine needle fire will start to burn in as little as 10 minutes. Your blood sugar will shoot up like a rocket.
Step 3) Right before your rising sugar triggers your insulin to squirt from your pancreas, prick your finger to get a drop of blood. Let’s say that tiny drop of blood contains 100 milligrams per deciliter of glucose. Your blood sugar was 100 mg/dl.
Step 4) Next, drain all the blood from your body so that we can measure your volume of blood.
Okay, okay, I am getting carried away. For your safety, we will estimate the total volume of blood held inside all the arteries and veins in your body. Most people’s complete blood supply ranges from five to seven liters. *
We pricked your finger and checked your blood glucose at just the right timing to find 100 milligrams of sugar in every deciliter of your blood. It is the moment right before your body triggers evil insulin.
Your body holds approximately seven liters of blood.
How many spoonfuls of sugar are dissolved in your body before triggering insulin production?
Let’s do the math. Look at this breakdown. *
Think back to your 6th-grade algebra class. Convert all your labels back and forth with milligrams to grams and deciliters to liters. Your 7 liters of blood holds around 7 grams of sugar, otherwise known as a heaping teaspoon of sugar.
What the heck does this have to do with the evil spirit of fruit?
One teaspoon of sugar is just over 4 grams of carbohydrates.
A rounded teaspoon is 6-7 grams of carbs.
YOUR PANCREAS DOES NOT CARE
If the carbohydrates came from cane sugar or from that fluffy piece of bread, or from applesauce. Your body will turn all those carbohydrates into sugars for your mitochondria to burn hot and fast.
Eat a slice of bread and add about 20 grams of carbohydrates or 5 heaping teaspoons of sugar into your bloodstream. That means 1 of those spoons of the sugar found in that slice of bread will circulate into the bloodstream as glucose, but evil insulin will whip the other four teaspoons of sugar into storage pockets throughout your body. *
Yep, insulin pushes those extra carbohydrates away into storage cells. Usually, these storage cells are your fat cells. And those stored carbs stay there until you choose to pee ketones.
Do you see why it can take some patients days to produce their first ketone?
They have been storing sugar for years!
Play along. Buy urine ketone strips. They’re cheap-around $15 for 50 strips. You’ll find them at your local drugstore. No doctor’s prescription needed. Just tell the pharmacist you need urine ketone strips. Don’t change a stinkin’ thing about the way that you fuel your body. Now pee on one of those ketone sticks 3-4 times a day to see it once, in a whole week, you turn on the ketone producing part of your body. You’ll know you’re producing ketones if your strip turns pink. Even a hint of pink means you win.
Most likely, you won’t create any ketones. Most of my patients don’t. They don’t even know how.
Let’s use another example. Take a bowl of rice. A little over a cup of rice contains 15 teaspoons of sugar. That’s 60 grams of carbohydrates in it.
Switch to a bowl of pasta, and you have 20 teaspoons of sugar or 80 grams of carbohydrates.
Let’s make the final step to close this loop. Take notice of this chart.
This is a list of fruits and the number of carbohydrates found in a 1/2 cup of each item. Look at the column farthest to the right. You ’ll see the grams of carbs each serving contains. Remember, our leveled teaspoon of sugar held 4 grams of carbohydrates. If we rounded the teaspoon of sugar, it was closer to 5-7 grams of carbs.
Line 1 – An apple-a half-cup of apple holds 9 grams of carbohydrates. Look at the size of a half-cup. It will not fit a whole apple. An apple gives us somewhere between 18-25 carbs.
Line 2 – Half a cup of a banana holds 17 carbs.
Check out the dried fruit. Yikes! For years I have told patients and my kids to eat these for fiber.
Busted. My kids ate those raisins and their blood sugar shot up, sparking insulin production. Their bodies turned 4 of the 65 raisin carbs found in that ½ cup into pine needle-like energy. The other 61 are stuffed into storage in the form of fat.
Verdict? Fruit is evil.
Fruits have been sold to all of us as healthy and nourishing. The truth is the opposite. We’ve been sold a bill of goods. Fruits are filled with sugary carbohydrates.
Fruits hold no essential ingredient for life. They are treats that you should only eat 3-4 times a year. The amount of sugar found in the fruits we eat today far exceeds what our bloodstream can hold. We shove that extra sugar into all sorts of nasty storage spaces in the name of ‘healthy living.’
The solution?
Fuel your body with ketones for a week.
You won’t regret it.
For more information about things like how sugar in fruit is bad for you, check out ANYWAY YOU CAN.
RESOURCES:
- Just, Tino, et al. “Cephalic Phase Insulin Release in Healthy Humans after Taste Stimulation?” Appetite, vol. 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 622–627., doi:10.1016/j.appet.2008.04.271
- LONGO, VALTER. LONGEVITY DIET. PENGUIN BOOKS, 2018
- Nuttall, F. Q., and M. C. Gannon. “Plasma Glucose and Insulin Response to Macronutrients in Nondiabetic and NIDDM Subjects.” Diabetes Care, vol. 14, no. 9, Jan. 1991, pp. 824–838., doi:10.2337/diacare.14.9.824
- Reeves, Sue, et al. “Experimental Manipulation of Breakfast in Normal and Overweight/Obese Participants Is Associated with Changes to Nutrient and Energy Intake Consumption Patterns.” Physiology & Behavior, vol. 133, 2014, pp. 130–135., doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2014.05.015
