Yes, Fruit Is Healthy For You
Takeaway Points:
Sugar has a bad reputation for being something that is inherently bad for you or worse than other forms of carbs, but this isn’t what the science says. Sugar simply tastes good, which is why it’s easy eat more of foods that have more sugar.
Along side the natural, unprocessed sugar, fruits have micronutrients that help maintain our health. Fruits are also a good source of fiber, which isn’t digested well by our bodies and helps us feel full and satiated.
Concerns about fruit being high on the glycemic index (GI) are generally misplaced. The spike in blood sugar that could happen when eating foods with high GI is mostly mitigated by the fiber in fruit. Furthermore, if you have fruit as part of a meal, especially one with ample protein, it will be digested slower and lessen a potential spike.
Don’t be afraid of fruit. Fruit is good for us!
I’m sorry that I have to say this, because unfortunately it’s one of the most bizarre misconceptions that I’ve seen in my years of working as a coach. It’s something I’ve heard surprisingly often: “Oh yeah, I try to watch my fruit intake, because there’s a lot of sugar in fruit”.
First of all, sugar isn’t nearly as bad for you as most people tend to think. Studies have validated that, when equated for calories, sugar is not necessarily any more damaging than any other carb source. The only problem, of course, is that sugar is a highly palatable, energy dense, minimal-nutrient ingredient which is used to impart taste and calories to existing foods - thus, it makes it easier to overeat these kinds of foods, and gain weight in the process.
This has led many people to believe that sugar is inherently fattening, or that it’s somehow worse than other carb sources, but there’s just no current evidence of that actually happening. I’ve also written in the past about how other cultures eat far more sugar than Americans, while also generally being healthier and having longer lifespans. All in all, it’s clear that while sugar makes it easy to overeat, it’s just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Still, this fear and demonization of sugar has led people to make some weirder assumptions. After all, fruits contain sugar, and if sugar is bad for you, then fruit must, by some definition, also be bad for you.
Another claim is related to the concentration of fructose. Fructose is a kind of simple sugar which is very easily digested, and commonly occurs in relatively high concentrations in fruits. It has been hypothesized to have some kind of link with diabetes or negative health outcomes, and is a significant source of added calories in the typical American diet, often in the form of the much-demonized high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sweetener derived from corn.
The problem is that while both of these are sources of fructose, they’re very different in terms of their delivery and effect on the body. The fructose that you consume in high fructose corn syrup, for example, is pure and refined - it’s just calories with nothing else, and thus has a high calorie density and no other nutrients.
In contrast, a piece of fruit, while it may be a relatively “high” source of fructose compared to everything else we see in nature, is virtually nothing in comparison to the highly refined HFCS. HFCS is a syrup comprised of all the fructose purified taken out of a crap ton of corn - and as a result, that purity is the real problem here, because that highly refined product removes all the other stuff that you normally consume alongside it.
That other stuff includes things like micronutrients (which are beneficial to long term health) and fiber. Fiber is the key thing here - fiber is minimally digestible by the human stomach, and so provides very little energy relative to the energy cost of digesting it in the first place. This also has the effect that, since fiber takes up space without contributing calories, it’s highly filling.
All that fiber fills up the stomach and makes you feel less hungry, without contributing much overall calories. This is a huge benefit of the consumption of fruits and veggies, and is why they tend to be so healthy - because consuming more fruits and veggies tends to mean that you’re more full and eating fewer calories elsewhere, while still getting plenty of nutrients.
This is exactly what’s missing when it comes to things like refined sugar or HFCS. All that extra “stuff” is what buffers that fructose, making it perfectly healthy and fine to eat, so taking it away is what makes it a lot easier for that sugar to be overeaten, and thus lead to health issues. If you tried to consume the same amount of fructose from, say, apples, as from a glass of high fructose corn syrup - well, you’d have to eat a lot of apples, and you’d very quickly run into the opposite problem of probably not being able to finish all those apples simply because your stomach is so full.
Thus, while fruit does have some sugar in it, yes, that’s rarely actually a problem, because that sugar is balanced out by everything else - with the end result that it’s virtually impossible to “overeat” fruit, simply because it’s already got all that important appetite-regulating fiber built in.
Likewise, this is exactly why the concept of juicing is a terrible idea. A juicer essentially functions by cutting out all the fiber in the fruit or veggie that you’re juicing, removing one of the key elements that make those fruits and veggies healthy.
It goes a bit too far to say that fruit juice is unhealthy, or that fruit juice is “just like soda” at the end of the day - independently we’ve seen that fruit juice can have positive health effects all the same, likely due to the fact that it’s still got more nutrients and is a slightly more well-rounded nutrition source than soda or other artificial sweetened drinks. However, it’s still partly on the mark - it would still be a far better plan to just focus on eating those fruits and veggies normally, when you’ve still got all that wonderful fiber in place while also getting in those nutrients.
Another concern is that the fructose in fruit may have a high glycemic index, meaning that it will spike your blood sugar.
Typically when you consume a carbohydrate, this means that your blood sugar spikes - carbohydrates are broken down into simpler sugars, which are then stored alongside water in your bloodstream before preferentially being used for energy (or potentially later being stored as fat, though this is less common). You eat a meal, your blood sugar spikes a bit, and then it goes down over the course of the day as you burn off those calories. Insulin is produced in order to manage the amount of carbs in the bloodstream, helping it to be absorbed into other parts of the body where it’s used for energy.
Diabetes arises when the body’s natural insulin production is hampered somehow, causing problems with its ability to then use those carbohydrates, and they build up in the blood to potentially harmful levels.
The glycemic index is a system for analyzing how quickly a consumed carbohydrate will be digested and sent to the blood stream. Carbohydrate sources are given a number between 0-100, which is given as a percentage of pure sugar - a 100 GI food would be basically pure sugar, a 50 GI food would be processed half as quickly, a 25 GI food would be processed half as quickly as that, and so on. Low GI foods are processed more slowly, and thus don’t spike your blood sugar as quickly, instead providing a more sustained effect over a longer time compared to a similar amount of a higher GI food.
GI has been theorized to be linked with health outcomes. For example, a diabetic has to understand the rough GI of foods because they need to know when to apply insulin to manage out the impact of a meal. It has also been hypothesized that the effect of high GI foods may independently cause negative health impacts or weight gain because they spike your blood sugar so quickly - however, this doesn’t really seem to be the case, as the research has generally not been very positive in validating this theory.
Another complicating factor is another metric called the glycemic load. Glycemic load is effectively the glycemic index, but further adjusted to account for the typical percentage of carbohydrate in a carb source. For example, the fructose in watermelon might have a high GI, but its GL is actually quite low because while that fructose is absorbed quickly, it comes packaged with a ton of fiber which slows down the process of digestion.
In short, once again, that fiber saves the day. When you consume fruit, that added fiber tends to, in addition to being more filling so that we don’t overeat those sugars, additionally mitigates the impact of those existing sugars by spreading out their digestion so that they spike your blood sugar less significantly.
Further, an easy way to lower the impact of any high GI food is simply to… eat it with other foods. That thing, that people do, in a typical meal. When you eat a piece of fruit alongside a bowl of protein-rich yogurt, for example, that carbohydrate will be further slowed down in its digestion because you’re mixing it in the stomach with proteins which are also more slowly digested. This means that while you can potentially seriously spike your blood sugar if eating pure sugar sources alone (drinking a soda, eating some ice cream as a desert, etc.), it’s rarely a problem if you’re eating those sugar sources in conjunction with a natural fiber source (as in fruit) or alongside other macronutrients (as in a meal with multiple foods mixed together).
The end result is that, while we might tend to think that fruit could be bad for us if we focus on that sugar in isolation, the reality is that it doesn’t often occur in isolation in the context of fruit. Combine this with the numerous demonstrated health effects of fruit consumption, and the fact that it can be a powerful way to help manage appetite (while also being sweet and delicious), mean that fruit is always a win. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that you should eat only fruit or anything silly like that, but it’s certainly a positive in the context of the standard diet.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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