Fruit Fail

My healthy diet doesn't include fruit. Shocked? You're not alone: this surprises people who continually hear "eat lots of fruits and vegetables!"

I initially stopped eating fruit when I read Norm Robillard's theory of carbohydrates causing acid reflux in susceptible individuals. I found fruit to be the worst food for giving me acid reflux, and I've rarely touched it since. Anytime I have, I've almost always regretted it within 20 minutes. Non-starchy vegetables quickly became a much bigger part of my diet: they're low-carb and full of nutrients.

Am I missing anything by avoiding fruit? Lots of vitamin C and fiber? I made a chart to find out. Using Nutritiondata.com, I chose five fruits and five vegetables that I eat (or used to eat) and looked up how much of certain vitamins they contained. I chose vitamins that most of them had at least of little of. I also noted their total carb and fiber content.

(Click for larger image.) Note that the bottom lines are averages, not totals. (I never ate five cups of fruits or veg a day; I doubt many people do.) For vitamins A, C and K, the vegetables listed are the runaway winners. Vitamins A and K are fat soluble, meaning they have to be eaten with fat to be absorbed. How often do people eat the fruits listed with something that has fat in it? I know I didn't before going low-carb. I eat veg with salad dressing, butter, olive oil or ranch dip.

It looks like I'd get a little bit more folate and two more grams of fiber from the fruit--and a lot more carbohydrate--23 grams per cup, on average. The carbohydrate in fruit is mostly sugar. It may be natural, but it's still sugar. If you're concerned about blood glucose levels, weight gain, your teeth, and a variety of other health issues, sugar in anything but very modest amounts is bad news.

Comments

Brooksie said…

Thanks for sharing this, I eat about two pieces of fruit a month and have done this for several years now. I cut way back on fruit consumption because is bothers my hypoglycemia, I pretty much listen to what my body tells me to do and I find that works the best. I am glad to know I am not alone.

November 17, 2010

Lori Miller said…

Brooksie, you're definitely not alone in eating very little fruit. My mom mostly leaves it alone (it jacks up her blood sugar) and Norm Robillard says he generally avoids it, too. Robillard adds that he uses a squirt of lemon or lime for flavoring, as do I. Dr. Atkins wrote that he had some patients who were so carb intolerant that they couldn't even eat the green salads he recommended on his diet.

November 17, 2010

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here . * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh. Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good. I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds. Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog