Effect of fruit rich diet on liver biomarkers, insulin resistance, lipid profile | Hacker News Reader

Effect of fruit rich diet on liver biomarkers, insulin resistance, lipid profile

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Disclaimer I only have access to the abstract. It seems unreal to me that you could explain a bmi jump from 25 to 31 in six months with a fruit diet. Their randomization doesn’t pass the sniff test.

IMHO, again without having access to the article, the most likely explanation is they have poorly matched trial and control groups with small (80) number of participants. That they didn’t report changes at all and just the final values raises a red flag.

The other major caveat is this was presumably done with Iranians and I have mostly no idea what their baseline diet is.

This. Plus hidden alcohol consumption is something that is never take into account while doing these kind of studies in muslim countries.

The fruit eaters drank more alcohol?

I think the GP means that the stratification for the intervention group and the control group does not consider alcohol consumption. It probably considers sex, age and initial BMI, but alcohol consumption is an important variable too.

"Conclusion: The results of the present study indicated that consumption of fruits more than 4 servings/day exacerbates steatosis, dyslipidemia, and glycemic control in NAFLD patients. Further studies are needed to identify the underlying mechanisms of the effects of fruits on NAFLD."

Nothing to do with the fact that they are 90% sugar?

Yeah this sounds like a something I'd read in a keto book I just read. High carbs -> poor insulin regulation, preventing the burning of fat and creating weight gain, plus various other pressures on the body which result from that.

I thought this too, but I've also seen speculation that fructose specifically triggers the body to be more inclined to store blood sugar as fat. If you think about it you can imagine an evolutionary just-so story for it. When protohumans encountered fruit, it was usually in a large quantity that couldn't be easily stored. Best to gorge and get chubby for later.

It largely has to do with different metabolic pathways for fructose vs glucose. Glucose can be metabolized in many places in the body, including directly in your muscles (glycogen) whereas fructose can only be metabolized in the liver.

Hummingbirds adapted to use fructose for energy production just like glucose:

> Now new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough shows they are equally adept at burning both glucose and fructose, which are the individual components of sugar; a unique trait other vertebrates cannot achieve.\

> From an evolutionary perspective the findings make perfect sense, says Welch. Whereas humans evolved over time on a complex diet, hummingbirds evolved on a diet rich in sugar. "Hummingbirds are able to move sugar from their blood to their muscles at very fast rates, but we don't yet fully understand how they are able to do this," he says.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131205165823.h...

> Hummingbirds adapted to use fructose for energy production just like glucose.

And fish evolved to respirate oxygen from water…what’s the point?

Only dried fruits may be 90% sugar. Most fresh fruits are mostly water, followed by sugar, fiber, minerals and other things. They may be richer in sugar on a comparative scale (because we cultivated sweeter varieties), and some of them may have a high glycemic index.

pretty sure fruits nowadays are so selected to the point of junk food banana/pineapple/mango/guava/grapes(!)/watermelon was never as sweet couple of decades ago...

Pretty sure fruit now days, is bigger, looks prettier, and ships better but definitely not sweeter.

Honeycrisps disagree with you.

“Our investigation found that more recently released commercial apple varieties have better storage capabilities, contain more soluble solids (sugars) and have less phenolic content. Recent efforts to improve our apples have been focused on keeping fruits fresh for longer and making them taste sweeter. With the expansion of global food markets and our growing preferences for sweeter tastes, these changes are indicative of the desires of modern society.”

https://theconversation.com/apples-werent-always-big-juicy-a...

The sad part is that the phenols are beneficial for physical, mental and microbiotic health.

Apples are believable, but that does not say much about the fruits mentioned.

Because those fruits do not get selected for their sweetness, their looks, their size? All indicators point towards a similar sugary path to me.

Cotton candy grapes

agreed. All the size is diluting the sugars. Tomatoes don't taste the same as they used to

Take a look at this one:

https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domest...

How do I get funding for garbage studies? "Our overweight group had bad bloodwork, too much fruit is bad for you."

Ya, it's not surprising that more sugar/calories (even from fruit) would increase BMI.

Caviat: only have access to the abstract

At least 4 servings of fruit vs less than 2 servings is a huge amount of variability, even within groups. Someone could eat mostly fast food and be in the control or eat a very strict keto diet and still qualify for the control group.

The abstract mentions no attempt to control for any food intake other than fruit, which in combination with the relatively small sample size makes this study basically meaningless IMHO

No surprise: A shitty diet + fruit is not going to make a big difference.

The article says there is a difference.

It didn't control for enough to draw any meaningful conclusions from the study.

A shitty diet + more fruit on top will likely be worse than just a shitty diet. Fruit has sugars. If you drank 2 liters of soda every day an extra apple isn't going to help.

The fruit is the shitty diet.

Yeah, humans as unspecialized frugivores shouldn't be eating fruit. (eye roll)

It’s not that we can’t eat it, it’s that in a paleolithic setting we would not have been able to eat banana every day.

I find that hard to believe. Humans don't make their own vitamin C which is a strong case for our need to eat fruit. A banana also barely has fifteen percent of the daily requirements for vitamin C. This study [1] finds that humans 200,000 years ago consumed up to 600mg a day of vitamin C - that's a lot of fruit.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14527634/

Perhaps it was not all from fruit? Early humans may have been eager to sever vegetables from their vines.

Animal meat can also contain vitamin C. There isn't much in the muscles, but other organs contain more of it. When considering whether paleolithic humans could survive with small amounts of fruits and vegetables only, we have to consider that they probably ate almost all of the animals they hunted. I.e. including organs, skin, and other less appealing parts. Nowadays, we mostly eat muscles. Thereby, we don't get the same composition of nutrients from meat than we used to.

No, it was 4 servings of fruit vs 2 servings of fruit. It was not just a diet of fruit. The rest of the diet wasn't controlled.

OK, but what else did they eat?

Hardly applicable to the public given the patient population in the study

It's applicable to people in the public with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, since that's the population they were studying.

Research also suggests that NAFLD is present in up to 75% of people who are overweight and in more than 90% of people who have severe obesity, also called extreme obesity.

The public is pretty fat, you know.

For a long time there has been speculation that large amounts of fruit aren't good for most people.

Wouldn’t this manifest in countries with fruit heavy diets?

Out of curiosity, which countries are those?

The West Indies seem to have comparatively high fruit consumption

Fruit was a seasonal "treat" (in Europe) before refrigeration and airflight extended the season year around.

Uh, source? Have you never heard of a cellar? There are lots of fruits that keep through the year until the next harvest season with simple technologies. Jams, apples, kangina for grapes (admittedly not in Europe).

Corporate interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

Reply on news.ycombinator.com