Debunking Nutrition Myths: Fruit and Fructose

Oh, man, you're going to get me riled up now about the fruit thing. Yeah, fruit makes you fat and all that. And that's one of those things that's been around for so long. I remember there being an article in testosterone magazines like tmag.com in 1996 or something. I think I was like 18. If you're going to do a bodybuilding show, you can't eat fruit. Fruit will make you fat. It's the fructose and blah, blah, blah. It's absolutely untrue. So when you look at everything biochemically, it's not a big deal, like the fructose stuff, especially fruit, because most fruit that you're going to be eating doesn't have a ton of fructose in it anyway. So if you look at a banana, a medium-sized banana's got, what, 20, 25, 26 grams of carbs, and when you look at how much fructose that is, it's really only about 5 or 6 grams. And when you start digging through the research, it's pretty inconclusive about what's the lowest threshold of fructose you can have before it starts making you fat. And you'll find numbers anywhere from 30 up to 150 grams of fructose, right? And that's in big bolus dosages. So if I think about bananas, so there's five or six grams of fructose in a banana, I can't tell you the last time I ate like six bananas in one sitting. And that's realistically what it would take to actually be a problem. And for most people, that's not a big deal. Even if you look at fruitarians who only eat fruit, you don't see a lot of big, fat, obese fruitarians because they don't eat a lot of calories. And at the end of the day, the calories are what matters. Absolutely. Yeah. And I guess with trends of like the whole keto movement of people claiming that it's the answer to fat loss, I guess it comes down to calories. You're restricting certain food groups out of your diet completely. and I guess you get people subscribing to one way of eating, whether it's paleo, whether it's ketogenic diet, whether it's veganism or whatever it is. I guess the answer is not always that sort of one-eyed approach.