I used to drink a lot of OJ when I was still under the illusion it was healthy to do so. Simply stopping that I lost about 15 pounds without changing anything else. It was tough at first, I really craved it and it was a daily habit. It's turned out to be the biggest health improvement I've made in recent years.
Whole fruits are healthy because of the fibers and nutrients in the pulp+skin. The fiber slows absorption and helps with insulin spikes.
Even "fresh juicing", which is crazy popular, isn't the same as just eating the fruit.
Fruit juice is evil.
And without the huge quantities of citric acid, the table sugar is less hyper-palatable. The associated acids make fruit juices almost perfectly engineered to maximize consumption. (The recipe is so perfect that Coca-cola uses surprisingly similar ratios.)
Fruit is evil.
The fruits we buy in the supermarket (or hipster organic farmers market) bare little resemblance to the less sweet and less palatable fruits that humans would have eaten prior to cultivation. Through an ongoing process (over multiple millennia) of artificially selecting for higher sugar content, we have turned nature’s fruits into the equivalent of candy bars.
If you want nutrients, eat vegetables.
There are sometimes better choices than an apple, but an apple is definitely better than a candy bar (or most breakfast cereals, granola bars, etc).
Vegetables are great, too.
Without nuance and education, "fruit is healthy" translates to "fruit juice is healthy."
Without nuance and education, "two serves of fruit per day" translates to "I'll eat a fruit salad and a glass of orange juice for lunch at my sedentary desk job."
Protip: chop up a large broccoli and sauté in a wok with olive oil, salt, pine nuts and chili flakes for a few minutes. Finish by squeezing half a lemon on top. Serve alongside a modest serving of protein. That shit is a meal, and damn tasty.
I guarantee you that you can eat tons of apples, oranges and other fruits every day and not get fat.
Also, you can't live off vegetables only. They just don't have enough calories to keep you going whole day. And you do need some amount of calories to perform and survive.
I don't know how you got from "fruit is bad" to "you can only eat vegetables" but that must have been a sweet trip. You do know there's other foods, right? Like plant oils, meat, dairy, and chocolate cake.
And if that wasn't hurting my brain enough, you think vegetables don't have calories? So you've never heard of the potato, have you? Or carrots, sweet potato, beetroot...
You cant sustain on carrots and beetroot. You just cant, caloric density is too low. You would have to eat too much volume of it. But, go ahead and try that. Eat only them and no nuts, no oil, etc. Observe how much active and performing you are after few days. Vegetarians don't live off vegetables only either.
Vegetables are very low on calories. That is literally why they are recommended for diet - but eat a lot of vegetables advice is not nearly the same as as "everything else is bad, eat vegetables".
In that case, shouldn't we distinguish between juice stripped of those vs. unfiltered juice?
They were testing the effects of calories as liquid or solid. The subjects could eat whatever they wanted in the study, the calories of which were carefully recorded. Then they added 1750 calories/day of either liquid as soda or juice, or solid, as jellybeans. They then measured how much the subjects adjusted their other calorie intake (the groups all rotated through solid, liquid, control).
When each group was on added solids reduced their intake of other foods by an average 1500 calories/day, negating all but 250 kcal/day of the extra intake (still a non-trivial addition, but...).
When each group was on liquids, their change in intake of other foods was negligible -- essentially all 1750 extra calories per day was added to their 'bottom line'.
The milkshakes & juices are missed a bit at the beginning, but it's definitely much easier to maintain weight than it used to be, and I've seen friends get even more spectacular results by merely cutting caloric beverages (one who used to have a case of Gatorade in his truck all the time lost so much so fast his wife thought something must be wrong and made him go to the doctor to get checked).
I thought it was quite interesting, and hope some others do too...
I wonder where this meme started and why? I cant imagine ‘big fruit’ is that big or sinister.
Is probably because we, humans, had seen before what scurvy can do to the body when you stop eating oranges, fruits and vegetables for just one or two months.
Significant amounts of vitamin C are in potatoes. People in general don't even know that, so I don't buy the idea that people are generally seeking out foods for their vitamin C value to prevent scurvy.
The drive to eat a special kind of food sometimes is common to many mammals. Not much different to being thirsty when you are dehydrated. Everybody experience sometimes a "thirst" for salt (in hot areas), sugar, or (in very cold areas) fat. Is a survival mechanism wired in our brain and not uncommon at all.
I bet that we would intuitively seek for foods rich in vitamin C if getting short of it.
This isn't a case where your body is craving a vitamin, and urging you to eat an orange. Your mind is saying "this is the right thing to do!", when in actuality, it's spiking your glucose.
Are you familiar with the phrase “banana republic” and it's origin?
Big fruit is, historically, not any less sinister than big oil, and, while less influential, powerful enough to be a major international force, and drive wars and major power policy.