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Comment by jbb555 | Hacker News Reader

I think that fruits have an issue too. The fruit we get today has been bred to contain a lot more sugar than they did originally. I'm not convinced that lots of fruit all the time is as good for you as it ought to be.

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There hasn't been a study showing that calorie controlled fruit diet will cause you any harm (except potential malnutrition if fruit selection is not as varied).

Just like excessive consumption of protein (but with a calorie cap) in healthy people shows no harm, or similar studies on healthy, physically active people.

Diet is just a part of a healthy lifestyle and a huge variety of diets can be healthy. This blaming of particular ingredient or macronutrients is unscientific, I as a skeptic dislike it very much.

Fruits are rich in fiber which slows down the absorption of their more "potent" sugars, not to mention that digestion of that fiber is far more taxing than digestion of something else.

Of course, if I were to eat excessive amount of calories it's quite probable I'd get the same symptoms as those people consuming the equivalent in refined sugars.

I agree. People always spam the "eat fruits and veggies" meme but come on, what is in fruit? Sugar and some fiber, maybe some vitamins. You are still just eating useless sugar. Let's not delude ourselves that fruits somehow contribute to fulfilling daily macros in a significant way. I consider them a treat, not a staple.

Sugar isn't useless. It gives you energy to function.

If one overconsumes and allows for that useless sugar to circulate, or useless cholesterol, or useless anything from overconsumption, a plethora of interesting metabolic things happen in the body and some of them cause disease.

This is a very nice skeptical stance on how to observe food in this age of non-personalized medicine and nutrition:

https://atheismfaq.quora.com/Is-this-food-healthy

They're not entirely bad though, like candy for instance, though perhaps they should be treated like candy. There appears to be some evidence that fibre suppresses the insulin response required to turn sugar to fat.

The problem is that people say "eat fruits and veggies" but what they hear is "eat [sugary] fruits"

and don't forget about vegetables, I swear every year carrots get sweeter and sweeter, it feels with some carrot cultivars they are nearly as sweet as corn used to be (now corn often just tastes like candy basically to me, some varieties I can't stomach due to them tasting way too sweet)

note I do not eat any sugar or sweeteners and haven't for years, so maybe that's why I am more sensitive to this

About a year ago I switched over to buying unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter. For about ... 2 days, I actually could tell the difference. Then it was fine. Then about 2 weeks later it tasted pretty much as I remembered peanut butter always tasting.

This gave me a serious moment of pause about how much sugar is added to manufactured foods.

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