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Jam is basically a 50/50 mixture of whole fruit and white sugar.

That really depends on how it is made. It's not useful to make blanket statements like this when there can be a significant amount of deviation from what you expect to be true without it not being jam anymore.

I think the parent comment was implying that jam can be healthy just because it uses whole fruit as an ingredient. The chemistry behind turning a mixture of fruit and sugar into something called jam is pretty well known - there has to be a certain ratio of sugar for it to "set". Usually this is 1:1.

I wrote my comment because I think that people are shocked when they actually see jam being made at home and how much sugar goes into a batch.

https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/09/22/what-makes-jam-set-t...

I am looking at a whole jar of plum jam made by my grandpa with 0 added sugar.

Then that is not jam...jam is defined as fruit with added sugar to act as a preservative.

The question is what did you granpa use as a preservative? The preservative is going to be the difference between say: jam, marmalade, chutney, etc...

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