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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

i think the most important take away with nutrition is eat what your ancestors ate. you're probably not japanese so its less likely that the results apply to you.

I myself switched from drinking soda to OJ. my health declined slowly for a long time until I found out my body doesnt like oranges.

fruit can be healthy but i doubt we are supposed to eat all fruit diets. Astin Kutcher took on Steve Job's all fruit diet and ended up in the hospital with pancreatitis. And we all know what happened to Steve Jobs.

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OJ is just sugar water though, the value of fruit is (I think) the whole fruit.

true, but i have an even stronger alergic reaction to the fruit :)

its also worth noting that fruit is sugar water. its 98-99% water + 2% sugar and fiber

Hm. I've heard lots of different angles on not eating fruit but never got these numbers. Thanks!

> its also worth noting that fruit is sugar water. its 98-99% water + 2% sugar and fiber

Oranges, apples, etc are only 85% water. Grapes 80%. The rest is fiber and is likely why your body tells you to stop eating them. Two and a half apples is a lot less appealing than a can of soda (actual sugar water).

The whole percent water thing is completely meaningless though, human brains are 85% water and babies are 80%.

The proportion of water is certainly not meaningless when considering the expected caloric intake of a food administered ad libitum. Satiety is partially controlled by stretch receptors in the gut lining and common sense will tell you it's much harder to consume the same amount of calories from a 2g/100mL sugar solution as from a 10g/100mL solution.

ah, i grossly over estimated the % water in those fruits. interestingly though, fruit juices fall in the 80-90% range I just read.

And the sugar is the wrong one - fructose which is metabolized mainly by the liver whereas glucose is used by all cells in the body.

What about the ones that include the pulp?

the ones with pulp are still providing you with a massive amount of sugar relative to pulp

you can easily drink the equivalent of 12 oranges, in one drink but very very few people can eat 12 oranges in one sitting

there is wisdom in that nature packages sugar with fibre, at times lots and lots of fibre (cane sugar for example)

Cane sugars good and/or not too bad? We used to munch on that as kids, although more often than not we just sucked on it, so probably not so good.

No difference chemically between cane sugar and sugar from beet. It's sucrose i.e., glucose and fructose joined together.

Sucked from cane is not too bad; in that form it has a lot of other nutrients that make it easier for the body to handle.

When it's refined into crystals, is when it does more damage, particularly when consumed to excess.

Depending on how many years you want to go back in your diet, it might be quite hard to find it, artificial selection has rendered most of the food our ancestors ate non-existent.

Dude, OJ isn't healthy.

I tried OJ once, first breakfast in US, OJ instead of milk, puked exactly one hour later, never drank it again. So much for the health benefits of fruit juice.

Any thoughts on what happened? Health benefits aside, vomiting after drinking orange juice is hardly a typical reaction.

Which ancestors? When?

By some accounts my ancestors have been eating potatoes and roast meat with quite a lot of beer and / or apple cider, for quite some time.

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