I think fruit, especially the modern stuff, is bad for you. In particular the stuff you want to avoid is. fructose, which is toxic for humans. Fructose is harder on the human liver than alcohol on a gram by gram basis, and over consumption of fructose can cause cirrhosis and fatty liver disease.
I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.
Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.
I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol. Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently. Whereas fatty liver caused by fructose is because of the quantity in a short period, overwhelming the liver.
If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs, sugar/sucrose, etc that are roughly half fructose, half glucose that are put into so much processed food with no fiber to slow digestion. A 12oz can of cocacola has 2-3x (39g) the sugar as a piece of fruit. Added sugars account for 14%[0] of the daily calories in the average american's diet (note, added means not natural sugars like that in fruit.. but sucrose, hfcs, etc). Any increase in fatty liver disease would be caused by the inordinate added sugar intake of american's, not fruit.
> I thought you would get from the "balanced diet" part that I generally don't feel the need to demonize individual food groups. Moderation is a good thing.
I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says.
> Fruit packages fructose with fiber, giving your body more time to process it. It also includes vitamins, minerals, etc that are good for you.
True and false. The fiber aspect is true, and a strong argument to stay as far away from juice as possible, but the vitamins story is ... mixed. It depends on what fruit you're talking about, where it was produced, and how it was handled.
For vitamins and other micro nutrients I personally think organ meats are highly underrated.
> I don't know how you jumped to saying it's worse than alcohol.
By looking at my source.
> Alcohol actually damages the cells of the liver, making it function less efficiently.
This is also true of Fructose. Except unlike Alcohol 100% of it goes to your liver. Also unlike alcohol there are no obvious cognitive effects for fructose, so we're free to consume as much of it without suffering any immediate and obvious consequences.
> If you're worried about fructose, then you should be focusing your efforts on hfcs ... processed food ... coca cola ...
Take a guess what I also recommend avoiding. But "avoid HFCS and processed food" is well into the "no shit" category of dietary recommendation these days, which is why I don't really bother to talk about it a ton. Whereas there are a large number of people who think that fruit and especially fruit juice is healthy, and I disagree.
> "I despise the notion of a "balanced diet", it's generic nonsense that gives no specific guidance towards what one should eat. How do you balance a diet? Nobody ever says."
To expand on this, what the hell is "balanced diet" anyway? In what sort of environment is fruit year-round "balanced"? In anything other than a tropical environment, fruit being part of a "balanced diet" is an ecological impossibility barring the modern global agro-industrial complex that ships you fruit from the other side of the planet no matter the season.
The idea of food even having seasons seems alien to most of us these days! At most whether a fruit is "in season" is a matter of how cheap it is, or whether the texture is precisely right. A food that is out of season might have a slightly undesirable texture and cost more, because it's been sitting in a warehouses and cargo vessels for too long.
The "balanced diet" as we know it today is a cultural artifact, not some biological truth.
In an ideal world, a "balanced diet" would mean eating only locally, in season and have none of this fad diet nonsense (vegetarian, vegan, carnivore, keto, etc). This would produce a universal diet that adapts to environment, wild life and the success and failures of local agriculture. It would be a cyclical diet, ever changing.
Maybe balanced diet is a poor choice of words... Local diet? Seasonal diet? Cyclical diet? IDK.
I do get annoyed about the definition of keto as a "diet", especially a "fad" diet. Ketosis is a biological process, and the "keto" diet is just designed to produce the state of ketosis on purpose. As such there really is no "keto" diet, as there are a pretty wide range of dietary choices that could produce the state of dietary ketosis.
Also, literally every religious tradition in the world follows the "keto" diet on a semi-regular basis: it's called fasting.
I'm not knocking ketosis itself. Just the absurd hoops people jump through to pretend their doing keto... how about just stop eating for a bit and you'll get a more robust ketosis. No need for hundreds of recipe books about keto desserts, keto friendly cakes and breads.
Just want people to keep things simple. That's why I was saying that stuff about cyclical dieting. In summer, there's a lot more carbs. In winter you'd change to eating more meat and fat. Since animals fatten themselves up for surviving winter. Eats what's currently in your environment. Prepare it properly. Move regularly throughout the day. Take time to relax and rest.
We’ve selectively bred our fruit for a millennia or two to make it significantly larger and sweeter than the versions we evolved with. The advent of pesticides as exacerbated the problem, as pesticide sprayed fruits produce a much lower level of useful anti-oxidants.
I guess it depends on the country. Fruit and vegetables in the US have had most of the taste bred out of them in favor of produce that can survive transportation while still looking good and will last a long time on the shelf and fridge.
America probably goes the furthest in this regard, but the trend is also older than America the country.
Examples:
The strawberries you and I eat are actually a hybrid species created in 1715. The wild variety, the woodland strawberry, is about 1/4 the size and much more tart.
Bananas largely come from one of two species, the main one having been domesticated 8,000 years ago. Humans of that era domesticated it for some reason other than the fruit, because the fruit was inedible, it took a few thousand years before we could eat it.
The lemon was hybridized citron and the bitter orange around 1100. Citron has a very thing rind, with the edible center part being typically the size of a golf ball. The bitter orange is ... not very sweet.
The oranges you and I buy in the store, tellingly called the “sweet orange” is a hybrid first mentioned in 314CE.
Edit: source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM