Several studies show that excessive fructose intake is harmful. There’s an increased likelihood of type two diabetes, weight gain, high cholesterol, and so on. Fruit contains mainly sugar, most of which is fructose, so people tend to think that eating fruit is bad for you.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately asking them what they like to eat or enjoy eating. Some of you said, “Hey, I enjoy eating fruit but I avoid it because I’ve seen it in the news or heard bad things about eating fruit.” If you were to sit back and think about it, have you ever heard of anyone becoming overweight from eating too much fruit? Or would it be from drinking beverages like coke or eating other foods that have high sugar, high fructose, and they eat too much of that. When you have coke or products with highly refined processed sugars that contain a lot of fructose in them, this fructose hits the liver much quicker than something like an apple would. Excess sugar that hits your liver that quickly, over time can lead to metabolic diseases and that’s what these studies are showing.
However, when you eat fruit it contains a lot of fiber, water, vitamins, and minerals. The fiber slows down digestion time and the time it takes for fructose to reach your liver.
Eating fruit can also make you feel fuller for longer periods of time. Most people when they eat an apple or a banana feel satisfied longer than if they were to drink a coke, eat candy, or some other calorie equivalent because of the fiber that’s in the fruit; there’s a lot of water weight to it, a lot of weight to the food in general, and it can fill your gut up and keep the hunger at bay.
Fruit, in most cases, is a great thing to add into your diet. Eating a variety of fruit can be good for you. Don’t avoid it unless you have to. Don’t avoid it unless your doctor tells you to do so because maybe you’re trying to go on a keto diet where you can’t really have sugar, or if you have some insensitivities that cause it to not agree with you.
Bottom line is, it’s very difficult to eat too much fruit to cause the issues that some of these studies are showing with excess fructose intake. You are better off eating fruit in moderation for the micronutirents and satiety it provides!
A few studies linking fructose and metabolic diseases:
“Adverse metabolic effects of dietary fructose: results from the recent epidemiological, clinical, and mechanistic studies” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23594708/
“Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673878/
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