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(Health Secrets Newsletter) Should you eat fruit or shouldn’t you, and if so, when? The camp that says you should skip fruit points to the fact that most fruits are high on the glycemic index, a measure of the effects of carbohydrate levels on your blood sugar levels. They claim eating fruit could lead to the development of diabetes, and add that the sugar in fruit is fructose, a sugar that is hard on the liver.
The other camp says eating fruit is essential to good health and keeping the body cleansed of pollutants and toxins, but cautions against eating fruits with other foods. Their concerns are solely digestive. Both points of view are interesting and can be compared to your own experience.
Let’s start with a little discourse on the matter that may help you reach a healthy decision in favor of eating fruit, and doing it without concerns.
Fructose and sugar spike concerns
Pure fructose metabolizes differently than table sugar, which is sucrose, although table sugar also contains fructose. Table sugar is generally 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. Fructose goes to the liver directly to be metabolized, and the metabolic product includes toxic byproducts rather than the instant energy that sucrose provices.
The stuff added to processed foods and beverages, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is anywhere from 55 percent to 90 percent fructose. A study at the University of South California (USC) concluded that most popular sweet beverages are 65 percent pure fructose.
You may think what the heck, it’s only 15 percent more than table sugar. But according to USC professor of preventative medicine and the Childhood Obesity Research Center, Michal Goran who led the research mentioned above, the 15 percent differential amounts to 30 percent more extracted fructose.
Goran points to the soaring rates of obesity among the young since the infusion of HFCS into their diets. Breast milk contains lactose, which is milk sugar and it not a problem for infants. But baby formulas, baby foods, children’s cereals, juices, sodas and other foods often contain HFCS and create a liver shock among the young.
Professor Goran is quick to point out that the fiber in fruit and other nutritional aspects inhibit rapid fructose assimilation and minimize the negative effects of fructose. You would need to eat a heck of a lot of fruit to endanger your health in any way according to Goran.
So, so good. Let’s eat some fruit
Many nutritional experts agree that fruit should be eaten alone, away from other foods. One assertion maintains that enzymes created to break down specific foods can be confused by putting starchy carbohydrates and proteins down the pipe together.
But some disagree, suggesting that every time you eat anything, all enzymes are produced. Additionally, many foods considered starches also contain protein.
But the sticky issue is what happens with fruit when it is combined with other foods. Fruit is digested quickly when eaten along. Fruit combined with other foods sticks in the digestive system along with the other slower digesting foods and begins to ferment, disrupting digestion of all the foods in the gut.
If examining these different perspectives was a bit dizzying, we can look into the premier diet-based therapy of India’s Ayurvedic medicine for settling any controversy. Ayurveda has been determining body-type diets for centuries.
Ayurvedic practitioner Dr. Vasant Lad shares most of the current food combining principles of not eating fruit with other foods for the fruit fermentation reason. He even confirms that melons shouldn’t be eaten with other fruits because they normally digest even faster.
He explains how Ayurvedic principles differ from biochemical based western medicine, and at the end of the source below, he offers a simple fruit/food combining graphic.
He also points out that some of us may have adapted to mixtures such as apples and cheese, which Ayurveda normally prohibits. So some common sense tempered by experience is in order.
For more information:
http://www.science20.com/michael_goran/issue_fructose_period-90840
http://www.trustedhands.com/content/fcbeg.pdf
Actually the fruit does not need to digest so it passes right through in about 15 minutes. You could say that it is a pre-digested food.