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Comment by SmallBets | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised so many still categorize fruits and vegetables together in these studies and in general thinking, given all we know now about sugar.

Fruits in terms of calories are essentially sugar, and despite the fiber, more than 1-2 a day will start to impact insulin, fat storage etc. negatively for most people. Especially fructose-heavy fruit.

Non-starchy vegetables are not nearly as sugar or calorie dense, can be eaten in much higher volume with little effect, and as such should be thought of much differently than fruit.

(non-avocado) Fruit falls more in the dessert/candy category IMO.

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The studies don't back this up one bit:

https://nutritionfacts.org/2017/02/23/can-you-eat-too-much-f...

The fiber makes all the difference in the world when it comes to metabolism of sugars.

Anecdotal, but I have eaten 5-10 mangoes a day, among other fruits, for long periods of time and remained at 8-10% body fat. I pay close attention to what I eat and how it affects my body composition, and I stopped worrying about eating too much fruit long ago.

The 2 main studies in this article are not very instructive -

1 was done on diabetics with groups eating more or less fruit, but no mention is made of what the rest of their diet was in relation to sugar/carbs. It mentions no impact to their weight or diabetes, but would their diabetes + weight have improved by cutting carbs, sugar & fruit?

The other study was n=17 so not very solid.

What's more interesting is research where fruit, sugar, and carbs are removed entirely or almost entirely (keto). T2 Diabetes is commonly reversed and weight loss adherence increases.

It's incredibly easy to overlook the calorific content in fruit - I was recently taking in at least 1000 calories per day from bananas/stone fruits/etc.

My rule of thumb is for vegetables to form the bulk of my intake (in terms of volume), with 1-2 cups of fruit per day as "dessert".

Basically, I treat most non-starchy vegetables as "free" - eat as many as you want. It's a mistake to think that fruit/starchy vegetables (pumpkin, potato, etc) are in the same category.

I think there is more to that, as I've never met someone fat who also eats a lot of fruits. My intuition is that you either feel filled more quickly with fruits, or too much fruit gives you the shit so you avoid it, or it hypes you so you consumes more energy?

Fruit _juice_ is more problematic. Drinks release a large amount of sugar very quickly into your system, they also don't "fill you up" and it is hard to quantify exactly how much you have consumed, meaning that people consume more sugar than they intended to. Drinks are directly absorbed into your gut without requiring digestion, and you can also drink fruit much faster than you could ever chew the same amount of whole fruit.

So yes, do avoid fruit juice, soda, smoothies, alcoholic beverages, ice cream, etc; but avoiding whole fruit is probably premature optimisation.

I like the rough guideline to change from eating vegetables/juicing fruit to juicing vegetables/eating fruit.

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