Eating fruit for health

As all around me are continually telling me to eat fruit, and as a society in general, and the NHS guidelines etc are constantly pushing the idea that fruit is healthy and indeed essential to health, it was interesting to read this summary by addiction expert Gillian Riley.

(The sugar contained in fruit is fructose.)

Richard J. Johnson MD has been conducting research, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, on the causes of high blood pressure since the late 1980s. With over 500 papers published, he could know more than anyone what fructose does in our bodies.

According to Johnson, the component in sugar that causes problems is the fructose molecule:



Rats fed a diet containing fructose don't gain weight if calories are restricted, but they do develop metabolic syndrome: high blood pressure, systemic inflammation, insulin resistance, bad cholesterol ratio and fatty liver disease.




Fructose disrupts our appetite, increasing hunger because it makes us resistant to the appetite hormone leptin.




When fructose is metabolized in the body, it has a unique ability to deplete energy production in every cell, and as a result to cause the cells to accumulate fat instead of releasing it.


There are two more interesting findings from this work. One is that some people don't absorb fructose, so even when they eat it, it doesn't get metabolized and so this chain of events doesn't occur. They are all those dreadful people who eat tons of rubbish, don't put on an ounce of extra fat, and have limitless energy. (The undigested fructose, however, does end up in the intestines, and promotes the growth of bad, "pathogenic" bacteria, leading to other kinds of problems later.)

The other finding is practically the opposite; that many people manufacture fructose from starches. So perhaps they ate wheat, for example, which doesn't contain fructose, but their bodies create fructose from that, leading to the same problems.

Dr Johnson says that fructose isn't just a calorie; it can be biologically active in a way that can lead to metabolic syndrome and autoimmune disease... He points out that about 4 per cent of Americans were obese back in the 1900's, and diabetes occurred in 1 or 2 out of every 1,000 people. It's now thought that diabetes will soon be seen in 1 in 3, and I believe obesity rates are currently 2 in 3.

Still think fruit is "healthy"?