Is Fruit Bad For Weight Loss? (Is Fruit Sugar Bad For You?)
– I’m often asked if it’s okay to eat fruit when trying to lose weight. And I think the reason is this. We know that sugar is bad for us, and causes weight gain, and fruits contain sugar, so surely fruit must be bad for weight loss? Or is it that because the sugar in fruit is natural, does that mean it’s okay? Because after all, we’re told we should eat fruit because there is loads of good stuff in there like vitamin C, flavonoids, and fiber. Do these good things somehow balance out the sugar and make eating fruit okay? Let’s find out.
(intro music) Hey, Carb Dodgers. I’m Doctor Dan Maggs. I’m so glad you’ve landed on my channel, which is all about achieving lasting weight loss through low-carb, real-food nutrition. If that’s something that is of interest to you, then make sure you’ve subscribed to my channel so that you get notified whenever I upload a new video. Let’s start with the sugar thing. The word sugar can be used for a few things, so I just want to clear this up. Typically, when we think about sugar, we think about table sugar or sucrose. Sucrose is a two-part molecule made up of glucose and fructose. Yet when people think about the sugar in fruit, we often think of it as just fructose, which is frequently called fruit sugar.
And yes, fructose is the main sugar in most fruits, but they also contain glucose. Sometimes people call glucose the blood sugar because it’s the main sugar in our blood. We also find sucrose in fruits, but the body quickly digests that, and we’re just left with glucose and fructose. So yes, these sugars come from fruit, which we can say is natural, but the body does not know if that glucose or fructose came from a banana or a chocolate bar. By the same logic, table sugar also comes from plants, sugar cane or sugar beet, so could be considered natural. I think it’s more helpful to think of them as naturally occurring sugars versus added sugars. That is sugar that naturally occurs in whole food versus sugar that we add to food.
And it’s important to note that these added sugars are the overwhelming source of sugar in our modern diets. There’s one place that fructose can appear in quite high concentrations in nature too, and that is in honey. Now, bears love honey and use it to gain weight before they hibernate. Some of you will be familiar with Winnie-the-Pooh. If you are, you’ll recall that his favorite food was honey and that he was also rather fat. Which, as it turns out, was no coincidence. So let’s find out what is it about fructose that makes bears and humans gain weight. For us humans, being overweight or obese is not important for survival in the modern world, but for our ancestors, it was critical. Nature wants us to survive when times are rough, for example, surviving a harsh winter.
Being able to effectively store fat during summer and autumn would have been a great advantage to our ancestors. Anyone who had a genetic advantage that meant that they were good at making and storing fat stood a better chance of surviving. This in turn meant they were more likely to reproduce and pass those genes on to future generations. The modern human’s ability to gain fat so effectively is a direct result of this strong evolutionary pressure. Let’s think about fruit in the wild. As fruits get riper, they get sweeter, and many animals will gorge on fruits in the late summer and autumn to fatten up ready for the winter when food might be scarce.
Fruits evolved to attract animals who like the sweet taste. Animals eat the fruits and spread the seeds and so ensure new plants grow. In turn, the plants give the animals the energy they need to survive the harsh winter that follows. It’s an example of a symbiotic relationship that has served both plants and animals for millennia. We see this weight gain elsewhere in nature too. Migratory birds also switch from an insect-based diet to a fruit-based diet to fatten up to provide themselves with the necessary energy for their long flights. And we now know that fructose is the major driver of this weight gain. The glucose from the fruit can be utilized by most cells in the body for energy. If it’s not immediately needed, it will be stored for later either as glycogen or as fat. But in this video, I want to focus mainly on fructose because fructose is metabolized in a very different way.
Fructose metabolism is unique in that it occurs primarily in the liver where it’s turned mainly into fat. Some of that fat will get transported out and around the body and stored under our skin as fat, but lots of it will get stored around our abdominal organs in what is known as visceral fat. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the fat stored around our middle is dangerous for our health. If you add even more fructose to the liver, some of that fat will end up getting trapped in the liver leading to the development of fatty liver disease. We know that somewhere between 50 and 90% of people with obesity also have fatty liver disease. Fatty liver disease causes insulin resistance and eventually type 2 diabetes. Fructose consumption also slows our metabolism down.
Fructose doesn’t just simply cause us to put on fat, our metabolisms slow down too, think hibernating animals, so we don’t burn fat as readily. We know that people who are overweight or obese burn less fat. And fructose also causes leptin resistance. Leptin is a hormone that is produced by our fat cells. Under normal circumstances, it tells our brain that we’re full and that we should stop eating. But fructose causes leptin resistance, and the normal feedback system that tells us to stop eating is less effective. We’re hungrier, so we eat more and we gain more weight. Fructose also stimulates hunger in other ways too.
The effects of leptin resistance are further compounded by the fact that fructose metabolism causes a low-energy state within our cells that mimics starvation. Our bodies see this as a crisis, therefore triggering hunger to try and correct this. If we continue to consume fructose-rich foods, this will just continue. It’s a vicious cycle or a positive feedback loop. So yes, fructose causes you to store fat, slow your metabolism, and it makes you more hungry. And this all makes sense when we think about it from a survival perspective. All of those things are good, even type 2 diabetes makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Higher blood glucose levels mean brain function is protected even when food is scarce. We’re genetically hardwired to gain weight when we consume fructose.
But that same system that was so important for our survival now predisposes us to develop obesity when our diet is high in fructose. It also underpins the vast majority of metabolic diseases that we see so prevalently in the world today. So how much fructose is bad? Until now, I’ve sort of presented this like a switch. Fructose consumption triggers all of this, but as Dr. Richard J. Johnson says in his book “Nature Wants Us To Be Fat,” it is better to think of it like a dial whereas you turn that dial-up and consume more fructose, the more negative the effects become.
As with all toxins, the dose is critical. Fructose isn’t toxic to the body at low doses. The problems start when fructose rapidly accumulates in the liver at high concentrations. The slower fructose is delivered to the liver, the less toxic the effects. The small intestines also act as a fructose shield. I mentioned earlier that the liver is the place where fructose is mainly metabolized, but it’s not the only place. A small amount of fructose gets converted into glucose by the small intestines soon after it’s been consumed, so it never even gets to the liver. We can therefore consider the small intestine as a shield that protects the liver from fructose.
So all of us, irrespective of our weight or metabolic health, can consume small amounts of fructose without it ever getting to the liver. However, higher doses of fructose, above about 5 grams, overwhelm this shielding capacity. So is eating fruit going to provide enough fructose to trigger the negative effects? Well, not all fruit is created equal. Different fruits contain different amounts of fructose. Some are low in fructose and some are very high in fructose. The National Healthy Eating Guidelines here in the UK suggest that we should eat at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. If we therefore choose higher fructose fruits such as pears, mangoes, or watermelons, it’s possible to consume more than 75 grams of fructose a day. And remember, that’s a minimum recommendation of five fruits and vegetables a day, not a maximum. Now, this level of fruit consumption is nothing compared to the amount of fruit that bears gorge on before their winter hibernation where a single bear can eat many thousands of berries daily. But for those of us who are trying to lose weight and who may have underlying metabolic issues, such as fatty liver disease, and as I already mentioned, most do, then clearly consuming this amount of fructose under the illusion that it’s healthy is a bad thing.
And fruits are also getting sweeter. Modern humans have been fiddling around with fruits and vegetables to make them more marketable, and that usually means making them sweeter and less fibrous. The fruit we consume today hasn’t always been this sweet. It’s been bred and modified to be larger and sweeter compared to the fruit even our grandparents would have eaten. Fructose is sweeter than glucose, so to make fruits and vegetables sweeter, we’re increasing the amount of fructose. The same is true for vegetables too. Have a look next time you go shopping. You’ll often see carrots described as sweet. Should carrots be sweet? And my personal favorite, super sweet sweetcorn, as if it wasn’t sweet enough already. What about dried fruit? Drying fruit significantly increases the concentration of fructose.
The fructose concentration of grapes, for example, is massively increased by drying them out and turning them into raisins. Add to that that most nutrients are destroyed by the drying process, making dried fruits just an effective sugar delivery system. The same goes for those dried fruit rolls aimed at kids. Yes, it might be better than spooning sugar into their mouths, but not by much. Eating fructose is better than drinking fructose because fiber is protective. Many fruits, as well as vegetables, are also rich in soluble fiber, which can slow the absorption of fructose. So yes, the fiber in whole fruit will slow down the digestive process and lead to fructose being delivered more slowly to the liver. That said, in the same way that we’ve been making modern fruits sweeter, we’re making them less fibrous to make them more palatable. But by far the easiest way to overwhelm the liver is by drinking fructose. Drinking is the worst because the liver receives a massive dose of fructose in a very short space of time leading to high concentrations and therefore the most damaging effects.
This is the reason that sugar-sweetened beverages are so damaging to human health. The evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages are associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes is overwhelming. And this is why many people believe that sugar should be taxed. Let me know in the comments down below whether you’re in favor of the idea of sugar taxation or against it. Given the strong association with disease, is it any different from taxing tobacco or alcohol? What about fruit juice or fruit smoothies? These have long been promoted as healthy foods and have been actively encouraged as part of healthy eating guidelines in many countries. The processing of these foods effectively destroys the fiber and drinking them means your liver gets a big hit of fructose.
We’ve had a small improvement in the UK healthy eating guide as it now says to limit juice and smoothies to one 150 mL serving a day rather than unlimited. However, that’s still 12.3 grams of sugar when the maximum recommended daily intake of free sugar is 30 grams for adults and 24 grams for children. So one small glass of fruit juice is over half of this for children, and that is before they’ve even eaten anything. Consuming fruit in the form of juice or smoothies encourages us to drink way more than we would naturally consume if we ate the fruits as whole fruits. And fruit is no longer seasonal. Importantly, our ancestors would only eat fruits seasonally, and occasionally honey, and therefore they were unlikely to develop persistent obesity. But for us modern humans we don’t have to worry as fruit can be imported, and shipped around the world, and then the supermarket tempts us with the colorful displays of shiny, perfectly shaped fruits.
All types of fruit are conveniently available to us all year round. Think for a moment. In your home region or wherever you are right now, what fruit can you see growing and how long will it be available for? Do let me know in the comments down below. Fruit does of course contain a wide variety of vitamins and minerals, but it’s nothing unique to fruit. According to the US Food and Drug Administration, “There is no single vitamin or mineral that is in fruit that can’t be found in meat, seafood, dairy, nuts and seeds, whole grains and vegetables.” So it’s not like you’re missing out on any special nutrition you can’t get anywhere else if you choose to stop eating fruit. Interestingly, whole fruits contain several substances that diminish the effects of fructose, such as vitamin C, flavonoids, and as we’ve already mentioned, fiber.
In some good news for moderate fruit consumption, there is some research to suggest that because whole fruit contains these good things, this outweighs the risks associated with fructose consumption. And what about glucose? I’ve deliberately focused on fructose in this video, but as I mentioned earlier, fruit does also contain glucose. I mentioned that some fructose is converted into glucose in the intestine. This can also be a problem for those of us with insulin resistance as the elevated blood glucose levels trigger the pancreas to produce insulin, which in turn promotes fat storage. And it’s for this reason that I’d recommend minimizing all of the sugars we get from fruit, not just the fructose if we’re trying to lose weight. And I’ve made another video all about this, which I’ll link to up here and at the end of this video.
So hopefully now you’ve a good understanding of the uniquely toxic effects that fructose has on the body. I want to thank Kimber Stanhope, Richard J. Johnson, Robert Lustig, and their colleagues for their incredible work in exposing just how dangerous fructose is. If you want to read more of their work, then I’ll leave some links down below in the description. But to sum this up, the sugars in fruit are natural, not because they’re any different from the sugars in chocolate. When you eat whole fruits they are delivered much more slowly and along with a variety of goodies that slows the absorption of the fructose when compared to, for example, drinking a can of cola.
So fruit in itself is not bad, but it’s nature’s way to fatten us up to help us survive in the winter months. For those who are metabolically healthy, it’s unlikely that consuming relatively small amounts of fruit will cause any harm. The real issue is the amount of fructose that we consume in the form of added sugars, especially by drinking sugar-sweetened beverages. I’d also add fruit juice and fruit smoothies to that list too. But if you’re carrying extra weight and want to lose it, or if you have other signs of insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes, then fruit, beyond a few berries that are very low in sugar, is not your friend.
Thank you for watching today’s video. I appreciate you being here and watching to the end. If you found this information valuable, please give this video a thumbs up and make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss any more videos from me. Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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