Eat Your Fruit: Reshaping Your Perspective of Fruit.

“When fruit literally becomes part of who we are, our lives become that much more fruitful.” Anthony William

 When thinking about fruit it is helpful to begin by using this comparison from a book I read. Think of the bottled water aisle at the grocery store. Do all bottle water companies think they’re offering the same water? They do not. Is a glass of drinking water the same as the water in your toilet bowl? Or water in a puddle on the sidewalk? Or freshly melted snow on a mountain? Or water in a fish tank? Water in a swimming pool? They are all water, but are they all the same? Far from it. 

Sugar is the same way. You can’t group all sugar together and say “sugar is sugar.” However, that is what society loves to do. “Fruit became an innocent casualty in blaming sugar for any illness.” The sugar found in fruit is not to blame for illness. When looking at statistics in the U.S., fruit consumption has largely declined in recent years. “In 2000, Americans consumed an average of 287 pounds of fruit yearly. By 2012 that number has dropped to 245 pounds.” 

Don’t confuse a pound of fruit with a pound of sugar. A pound of sugar is just that a pound of sugar. However, a pound of fruit “is a unique blend of life-creating, life-saving, life-sustaining phytonutrients and other phytochemicals that stop disease and promote long life”. The reality is, fruit does not have that much sugar in it as one might think. Fruits consist of “living water, minerals, vitamins, protein, fat, other nutrients, pulp, fiber, antioxidants, and pectin”. If you wanted to compare “100 pounds of refined sugar to the equal amount of fruit it would be thousands of pounds of fruit”. Fun fact, there is more sugar in pizza than you will ever find in fruit. 

There is a lot of misinformation out there about fruit and the truth is fruit does not harm the body in any way the way refined sugar does. 

Fruit is also strongly linked to fertility. Without fruit fertility is at risk. Women who are struggling to conceive would actually benefit from eating fruit unlike what many people say. “A woman’s reproductive system is like a flowering tree that requires the proper nutrients to bear fruit. And those nutrients come from, well, fruit.”

In addition, a woman’s reproductive system needs all the antitumor, anticancer antioxidants that only come from fruit. Fruit’s polyphenols, bioflavonoids, disease-stopping pectin, vitamins, and minerals help to prevent and stop things like Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID), and other hormonal imbalances. 

Another misconception about fruit is not to eat fruit that isn’t in season. This true when it comes to where the fruit was grown. “The truth is, those fruits are in season… in the places where they were grown.” For example, if you took a vacation in the fall to Mexico and would you not eat the fresh mango there even though they weren’t in season at home? If a fruit was grown in a place where it is in season then it does contain all the nutrients it should and it will benefit your body. Another argument when it comes to fruit is that it was picked too early and ripened off the vine and therefore it can’t be nutritious. This also not true. “Truth is, if a fruit were truly picked too early to have nutritional value, it would never ripen at all, and you’d find it inedible.” When fruit does ripen after it is picked then it does in fact contain the beneficial nutrients because it was able to ripen at all. 

You also may not know that there is a difference between GMOs and Hybridization. Hybridization includes grafting and hand-pollination, which are “safe techniques that have been used for thousands of years to create new varieties of fruit”. Hybridization is a healthy adaptation, it is not the same as genetic modification and GMOs. 

Also, fruit does not feed cancer, it does just the opposite. Fruit is anti-cancerous, it fights cancer more than any other food. 

A great habit to get into is consume fruit every day. Remember to opt for organic when possible, especially when it comes to fruit that you eat the skin. Such as all berries, apples, and pears. Organic is less important with fruits like bananas, pineapple, and kiwis, although, organic is still better to reduce pathogens entering the digestive tract. Fruit is also a great prebiotic to feed the good bacteria that resides in our microbiome. 

“When fruit literally becomes part of who we are, our lives become that much more fruitful.”

William, A. (2017). Medical medium: secrets behind chronic and mystery illness and how to finally heal. Place of publication not identified: Hay House Inc.