If Fruit Is the Main Health Food You Consume, You Are In Very BIG Trouble
Why Fructose is Bad
Fructose is nature’s natural method to make us fat.
Fruit, and specifically the sugar contained in fruit, fructose, has an evolutionary role in our existence. It has helped to keep us alive through the winter by making us fat.
Fructose is very different than glucose, the sugar our body uses to make energy, and it is the details that make fructose unique that enable us to see its true nature.
Fructose is 2.5 times sweeter than glucose and it activates our most understood addiction pathway for alcohol. Fructose is alcohol in the body or the other way around. Either way, alcohol and fructose are metabolized in exactly the same way.
“But I like fruit, it tastes so good!”
Ok, fructose is sweet and we like the taste. Why is this the case?
Fructose inhibits our satisfaction from the eating sensation which is controlled by the hormone Leptin. This means that when we consume fructose, we will not get “full” from our meals like we usually would or should, and this then leads to overeating.
On the other side of that equation, fructose stimulates our hunger hormone Ghrelin, and this causes us to want to eat more when we eat it. Fructose produces food cravings within 3 hours after eating it.
To summarize – eating fructose from fruit or processed foods will make us hungrier and prevent us from feeling full when we do eat. This sounds like a very bad combination, and it is.
Fructose also stimulates the accelerated aging process by producing high levels of Advanced Glycation Endproducts, or AGEs.
The liver is the only organ that can readily metabolize fructose and when it does, it only uses about 10% of the calories for energy and stores the other 90% as fat. The energy produced from fructose causes an increase in oxidative stress, inflammation, and cellular damage. The fat produced from fructose is transported by the new small dense LDL cholesterol carriers and is then stored in our fat tissue. This raises blood LDL cholesterol significantly.
Fructose triggers our metabolic fat, brown fat, to be converted to non-metabolic white fat. This is not good.
As there are no biochemical reactions in the human body that require fructose, this forces the liver to store it as visceral fat and this visceral fat is the number one cause of fatty liver. Fatty liver in turn impacts the ability to respond to hormonal signals like insulin, and this causes insulin resistance.
This has been documented so well that it has been declared that fructose is the cause of the global type 2 diabetes epidemic.
As we evolved, fruit was only available seasonally and for a limited time each year. The nicer weather during the summer, the ease at collecting fresh fruit, and the reaction it produced in our body by keeping us from getting full, made us hungrier for more super sweet fruits and consequently made us gain fat for the winter in the form of visceral, liver, and body fat. This mechanism is also used by bears preparing for hibernation, birds that migrate, and even fish that can go without food for an entire season each year.
The problem is however that we don’t hibernate, migrate, travel long distances, or go without food for extended periods, but we do keep eating fructose in all its forms, and this then causes insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes, drives our addiction physiology and ultimately leads to Alzheimer’s Dementia and cancer.
In the past, fruit has made us fat, hungry, and always wanting more. But then the summer season ended and the fall and winter set in, and we were forced to go without as many accessible foods. We could then use the recently stored energy in our body fat to survive.
Today we eat fructose in many unnatural amounts and forms and, as we do we don’t feel satisfied or full, we create addiction, weight problems, and ruin our health as we slowly develop diabetes and other chronic diseases.
So, when you ask me if I am saying that fruit is bad, you might see how it is a very difficult question to answer easily, and after reading this, you can probably figure out where I stand without having to ask.
Even with this information freely available, people wonder why our kids are overweight, have problems focusing, and grow up to become sicker than we have ever been, and at a much faster rate. Personally, I don’t see any reason to give kids fruit to eat daily as either a snack or as a health food, or even just once in a while.
Fructose is not a nutrient and is not needed in our body. It ultimately causes more damage to our body and health, rather than doing any potential good.
Carbohydrates are also not essential nutrients that we need to have in our diet and as fructose is toxic, it can definitely be eliminated altogether. If you are concerned about nutrients that you might miss, all green vegetables have much more to offer than fruit does.
If you are relying on fruit as a significant contribution to your diet, you may want to rethink that.
We can do better!
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