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.
In that case, shouldn't we distinguish between juice stripped of those vs. unfiltered juice?
Fruit juice is evil.
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".
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.)