After years of being told that we should eat a variety of fruit, I know it can seem a little counter-intuitive to ditch fruit from your diet (apart from cheat day of course).
So I wanted to dig a little deeper into the reasons why fruit is a no-go.
Just in case you were tempted to let a little fruit or sweet treat creep back into your daily eating habits.
a recap of rule #4 – don’t eat fruit
While fruit does contain vitamins and antioxidants, it is loaded with sugar. So the carbohydrate content of fruit unfortunately is too great to justify the vitamins. It’s much wiser to rely on vegetables for their antioxidants and other benefits and leave the fruit for your cheat day.
Tomatoes and avocados, which I think of more as vegetables, are technically fruit. They are allowed in the Slow Carb Diet because they aren’t high in fructose.
Apart from just being high in carbohydrates, fruit contains sugar mostly in the form of fructose, or ‘fruit-sugar’. The problem with fructose is that our bodies can only process it in our liver.
Our livers aren’t designed to handle the high fructose in a diet rich in fruit (or high fructose corn syrup). So when we eats lots of fructose our liver converts it to fat and either stores it as fat in our liver or sends it off to be stored in our fat tissue.
As Gary Taubes points out in Why We Get Fat, ‘Even forty years ago biochemists referred to fructose as the most ‘lipogenic’ carbohydrate – it’s the one we convert to fat the most readily’.
fructose & insulin resistance
Over time, exposure to fructose makes our livers more and more resistant to insulin which also causes our muscle tissue to become more resistant to insulin. Which means we need more insulin to do the same job of regulating our blood sugar levels. Enough said.
fructose & cholesterol
In the 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss experimented with the effects of fructose in the form of a twice daily large glass of orange juice in the morning and before bed.
After only one week of his daily orange juice habit, his cholesterol went from 203 to 243 (which is out of the healthy range). His LDL cholesterol followed a similar pattern.
So fructose not only has a negative impact on insulin resistance, it also negatively impacts our cholesterol.
fructose & iron
The other surprising result from Ferriss’ orange juice experiment was that his iron levels when from normal to way above the normal range.
For men this is particularly bad because they don’t menstruate and therefore don’t have a way of getting rid of excess iron. Excess iron has been implicated with an increased number of heart attacks in otherwise healthy males.
sources of fructose
While fruit is an obvious source of fructose, it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for other, less obvious sources.
High fructose corn syrup is used extensively by food manufacturers these days, mainly because it is one of the cheaper sources of sugar. This HFCS contains the same fructose as in fruit so it’s important to make sure you also keep anything with HFCS to cheat day only.
Normal white table sugar, also called sucrose is actually made up of half glucose and half fructose. So any sugar in your tea or in baked goods made with sugar is about half fructose.
Fructose is also the main sugar found in honey and agave nectar as well.
missing a little sweetness?
Cinnamon in your coffee can be a great way to give a little sweet boost without resorting to the sugar pot.
Vanilla extract (not vanilla essence which is artificial vanilla) can also make things taste sweeter without sugar.
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