Liquid calories - beware of juices, fruit or vegetable

Fruit and vegetables have fructose in them, but not that much. Even the sweetest fruit - the apple - has less than 8% per serve. However, the packaged fruit juice business is where we are over-consuming fruit often.

Remember, that the dietary guidelines suggest we have 2 pieces of fruit and 5 serves of vegetables. We tend to think, "I've only had 2 serves of vegetables today so I'll have 5 pieces of fruit to make up for it" but that is not healthy. You can't mix them up like that. Fruit is good for you but in moderation ie. the 2 serves a day.

Rats force-fed fructose had horrible things happen to them - heart disease, stroke, diabetes, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer and breast cancer. However, Gillespie makes this sad but true observation: "...everyone is still too scared to test fructose on humans...except at the local juice bar" (p. 64, 'Sweet Poison) 

I love Boost Juice Bars. I have a Vibe card, which is their loyalty program, and used to love getting a Boost smoothie for a treat, after my friends Anna and Theresa got me onto it over 6 years ago. However, the fructose in them is way too high. Same with any fruit or vegetable juice really. You take away the fibre and have mainly fructose. We are eating less actual fruit and vegetables but just drinking the juice, which is less beneficial. As Gillespie says, "Juicing converts fruit and vegetables from a food source containing significant fibre mass, flavoured with fructose, to one containing little other than fructose and water - oh, and some Vitamin C." (p.82) Having the fibre, at the same time as the fructose, is better for your system.

Years ago, I read not to have 'liquid calories' as we eat enough calories without drinking them as well!

The sad thing about the rat testing is that people used to say that it is little wonder that the rats got sick on that amount of fructose as humans just don't eat that much. Sadly we do. "In 1999, every person in Australia ate just under 38kg of fructose of sugar [while Americans were at about 44%]", Gillespie says on p.93 of the Quit Plan. Around that time, the Americans were eating 33kg of fructose a year which is significant as "fructose subverts our appetite control and creates fat immediately, 33kg would be directly converted to almost 15kg of body fat every year". The gyms, fitness crazes and diets can only do so much but it's as if they are "pushing water uphill with a rake ...in the context of the fructose tidal wave"

Back in 1810, our main source of fructose was the occasional piece of ripe fruit and  a bit of honey. We had about 1kg of fructose per year. We're having far more than that now, to our detriment.