Health consequences of having as much fruit as you care to eat?

My A1C is normal, but I have determined if I eat too much fruit, I pee a lot at night and sometimes my bladder has pain even after I go. This has been going on for a couple years now. I’ve been checked for bladder cancer and doctor has tried different pills which clog my sinuses up at night. When I don’t have all the sugar, I have no issues. So I really have to watch it.

@SoCalGardenNut Fruit = carbs. And our modern fruits are bigger, sweeter, and less fibrous than the wild fruits our ancestors ate, thanks to decades of breeding for those characteristics.

I know, I meant to say I eat the carbs from fruit, but not plain carbs. Carbs are in some vegetables too.

I think there is a consequence in overdoing anything. If you overdo it with fruits by definition it is replacing other stuff you should be eating.

Having said that it has to be healthier than a beer or junk food habit, which is more common and shortening people’s lifespans. Moderation in everything including moderation.

1 Like

https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/making-the-case-for-eating-fruit/

From the article link above: Dr. David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, said that sugar consumed in fruit is not linked to any adverse health effects, no matter how much you eat. In a recent perspective piece in The Journal of the American Medical Association, he cited observational studies that showed that increased fruit consumption is tied to lower body weight and a lower risk of obesity-associated diseases.

Whole fruits, he explained, contain a bounty of antioxidants and healthful nutrients, and their cellular scaffolding, made of fiber, makes us feel full and provides other metabolic benefits. When you bite into an apple, for example, the fruit’s fiber helps slow your absorption of fructose, the main sugar in most fruits.

Fiber provides “its greatest benefit when the cell walls that contain it remain intact,” he said. Sugars are effectively sequestered in the fruit’s cells, he explained, and it takes time for the digestive tract to break down those cells. The sugars therefore enter the bloodstream slowly, giving the liver more time to metabolize them. Four apples may contain the same amount of sugar as 24 ounces of soda, but the slow rate of absorption minimizes any surge in blood sugar. Repeated surges in blood sugar make the pancreas work harder and can contribute to insulin resistance, thereby increasing the risk for Type 2 diabetes.

6 Likes

Sadly you are looking at the whole correlation does not equal causation bit. Is high fruit consumption the cause, or that people with high fruit consumption also have other healthy habits?

Just from a basic common sense perspective, if you are eating lots of fruit you are not stuffing your face with the average American diet composed of junk food and empty calories. That alone should be a net gain.

2 Likes

@alan

Dr’s can say anything… and often are dead wrong. If your doc has not had the experience of being deathly ill… and being forced to experiment with diet (elimination diets) to find healing… not worth listening to IMO.

The doc in the vid above has that experience. Listen to him please.

Very little differeence in the % of Doctors with T2D and Obesity… than the average patient. Dont put too much faith in any so called expert… unless they have had the experience.

Most Dr’s have not had the experience and really just do not know the truth.

There are many many humans that react severely to fructose and other simple sugars. The FODMAP elimination diet helps them with that.

Search the web a bit on fructose and gut issues…

Your doc is saying something that simply is not true… and that is not uncommon for doctors.

Ken Berry has a quite popular book titled. 9 Lies my Doctor told me.

Goog search turns up this…

Fructose malabsorption leads to osmotic diarrhea as well as gas and bloating due to fermentation in the colon. A low-fructose diet has been found to improve IBS symptoms in some patients.Jun 2, 2015
.
A Doctor telling a lie out of ignorance of the truth (has no real experience with it)… sugar consumed in fruit is not linked to any adverse health effects, no matter how much you eat.

2 Likes

I put my faith in research and people who make their points in text and never sensational videos which have become the place where facts die in this world. Also where charlatans come to make their fortunes- I’m not saying yours falls into that category, but we’ve been through this all before and you did provide me with some text that explained your perspective. I don’t have that patience to learn by watching people speak- it’s sooooooo slooooooooow.

Of course there are going to be a percentage of people that react differently to diets and data is general while you are a specific person.

Did you happen to read my link? Given you are calling the writer “my doctor” indicates you haven’t and his opinion is research based and not anecdotal.

You are free to express your experience but that does not discredit the research and doesn’t need to for your experience to be valid. Meanwhile I am happy to eat as much fruit as I want, am 70 years old and the only drugs I take are from coffee, 12 fl. 0z of beer nightly and a single quick toke of marijuana to help me sleep. I can do the work of any 40 year old I know besides my Ecuadorian helper and I haven’t had so much as a cold for 3 years (thank you mask) or missed a days work to any physical ailment. I realize that I’m extremely lucky and a big part of this is genes, but I also have a strict exercise regimen to augment my work, limit my meat to about average Asian diet levels (check how much longer the Japanese live than we do) and eat tons of vegetables, often in bone broth and seafood, especially wild salmon once or twice a week.

7 Likes

1 in 3 people…

1 Like

That does not mean that the cellulose scaffolding doesn’t solve this problem, which is obviously the contention of the writer of the NYT article. If eating tons of fruit led to a problem to a third of human beings how the hell could that not have shown from the research discussed.

@alan … I stopped reading after he told the huge lie in the second paragraph. Dont care to read any more of that…

Glad he is not your real doctor.
Please dont take him seriously.

1 Like

How about taking science and research seriously. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/eating-whole-fruits-linked-to-lower-risk-of-type-2-diabetes/

What is generally true doesn’t apply to everyone and what applies to some people does not necessary apply to the vast majority of people.

That said, the science is evolving and the idea that you can eat as much fruit as you like is not established science and still a matter of opinion based on research that is opposed by other research. However, it appears to me that current balance of research is supportive of eating lots of fruit.

This study is the most recent and most supportive of high, fresh fruit diets that I’ve found so far. I need to stop searching this stuff up and go do some real work. Growing evidence fruit may lower type 2 diabe | EurekAlert!

There seem to be many studied that confirm the above and I can find no studies that contradict them, only recommendations at medical advise sites. Here’s more on the fruit side.

3 Likes

I am a physiologist. Fructose metabolism is not my exact field, but I’ve read a lot about it. Richard J. Johnson, M.D., the Tomas Berl Professor of Medicine and the Chief of the Renal Division and Hypertension at the University of Colorado has done a lot of research on it and published a consumer version in “Nature wants us to be fat” (videos of his talks on YouTube for free).
Short version (well, shorter than the book).

  1. What eating fructose does:
    Fructose metabolism requires energy and is not controlled, as is glucose metabolism (the form of sugar in blood). In quantity, fructose quickly burns up liver cells’ energy and causes damage. [This is why consuming high fructose corn syrup is not the same as consuming sugar - it has MUCH more fructose]. In the fall, mammals getting ready to hibernate binge on ripe fruit and get a big dose of fructose. This switches their metabolism from “fat using” to “fat storing” and they massively put on weight [just like I do with Comice pears at Christmas). In essence, high fructose consumption creates a diabetic state. It is reversed by fasting, so this does not create chronic metabolic disease in hibernators.
    Hummingbirds are even better example. In the course of one day, their consumption of nectar and hummingbird food (table sugar, sucrose, is broken down to fructose + glucose) causes them to become diabetic and develop nonalcoholic fatty liver! At the end of the day their livers look like pearls of fat! Their diabetes and fatty liver resolves after an overnight fast. In the morning they awake with almost no energy stores and do it all over again. [yes, fasting in humans can cure type II diabetes. See Dr. Jason Fung. No one said it was fun].
    2 About fruit:
    Chimps eat a diet rich in fruit, but the fruit is fibrous and not sweet. People can’t survive on it (primatologists have tried) - we lack the grinding teeth and fermenting guts needed to extract nutrition from that food.
    In contrast, people choose ripe sweet fruit. We have been selectively breeding fruit for sweetness (high sucrose and fructose content - just ask @fruitnut) for thousands of years. For example, wild and ornamental varieties of peaches have almost no fructose [1], whereas our edible fruits have substantial sucrose and fructose [2].
  1. My view:
    not medical advice - fruit, fruit juice, HFCS beverages probably won’t cause chronic metabolic disease if you fast every once in a while. Time-restricted eating (12-18 h between your last meal of the day and your first meal of the next day) might be enough. YMMV. If you are diabetic, pre-diabetic or have fatty liver - don’t add to your burden. You don’t want to take insulin, risk going blind or get your feet amputated. Fast and get your metabolism back to normal, then have at the fruit.

Happy growing and eating!

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tpj.13890
[2] https://www.funmeddev.com/img/fichier_074053a055a65eaa8f27ac90df1217d3.pdf

7 Likes

Not a doctor, but my husband and I eat boat loads of fruit. Neither of us have diabetes, no digestive issues either. He’s from German and English stock. We don’t drink sodas, no fruit juice either, and no alcohol. We eat 3-4 fruit a day, in the summer I consume at least a pound of cherries a day.

3 Likes

@SoCalGardenNut … some people are lucky in that way… some are not.

Excessive carbs for you may be 300 g net a day.

For me it is 30-35 g net a day.

When i go over that for 5 6 7 days… or less… immediate return of authritis and gut pain/issues.

And again age is a big factor in that… when i was 15 20 yo… did not bother me at all (that i could tell) to eat 300g net carbs a day.

And then there are others that even in their youth… hip and knee replacements… exceeding their carb limit.

2 Likes

I have hip arthritis too. When it rains is when I can feel it. Otherwise, swimming daily seems to keep it at bay.
I’m close to 63 and my husband is closed to 72.
I thought my husband had problem with gluten so he went gluten free, keto diet for a while. It turned out it’s the lack of magnesium, so he takes that vitamin daily. But one thing he did have and nobody mentioned it is high triglycerides, somehow the low carb diet did bring it down. I think it’s pretty normal level now.

But I’m glad you found what works for you, I don’t eat raw spinach for a reason, I’m low in Vitamin D and raw spinach would interfere with the absorption of calcium.

2 Likes

From the research I showed, it’s pretty clear to me that fructose is not fructose and your professor (or whoever composed the chart on quantities of fructose) does not seem to take into account the research that indicates that fruit juice creates health problems that whole fruit, with it’s cellulose-fructose scaffolding does not. Instead of posting advice how about finding out what information the Dr. derives his advice on. Even on that, I would stick to Dr.s that treat diabetes or teach Drs who do. The research paper you provided appears to contain no information about how peach fructose is digested and its affects on diabetes.

How about skimming through the links I provided, and then commenting. These contain peer reviewed, published research papers that study the affects of eating generous amounts of fruit. There was a larger study done in China I didn’t link to (only found articles about it and couldn’t find the research paper) that came to the same conclusions as the others.

Can anyone find recent research that comes to a different conclusion? That is that there is a point that eating too much fruit can cause diabetes. I’m certainly open to some real information on this, even if I have an ax to grind as a professional orchard keeper for rich people who I want to consider fruit healthful, and in large quantity.

Yes, there is plenty of “expert” advice out there suggesting differently, but aren’t you curious what it’s based on. It takes many years to become and established “expert” and not all such people keep up with the latest research- probably something to do with male hubris.

I think one problem here is that you can’t extrapolate one single data point into a conclusion. Simple carbohydrates can reach toxic levels but those toxic levels are not coming from fruits. For example a whopper has twice the carbohydrates as an apple, and everything else we can junk food.

Heck I kid you not, I halved my triglycerides while eating butter and switching from canola and corn oil to lard. Things are not as simple as this is good, this is bad.

3 Likes

Fructose is metabolized entirely by the liver, so you are likely stressing your liver some.

If you stay away from other sources of sugar it likely isn’t much of a problem though. For all sugar that is in good fruit, it isn’t nearly as much or has as much impact as nearly any kind of pre-prepared food or drink. However, if you are adding fruit on top of that or eat lower fiber fruits in huge quantity it is likely to make the problems caused a bit worse.

That does not apply to fruit juice, though.

1 Like

Not really. The biggest issues is that your body finds it ridiculously easy to link carbohydrate chains into fatty acid chains so extra sugars go straight into fat. In addition the chemicals lead to both inflammation and free radicals, which along with the excess fat gives you the trifecta of causes leading to metabolic syndrome, cancers, and overall systemic failures.

And yet as Paracelsus said ages ago, the poison is in the dose. Eating a ton of fruits probably will not get you there, but your average sugar laden American diet will.

1 Like