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Old April 22nd, 2010, 01:47 PM posted to alt.support.diet.low-carb
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Default "Fruits are great for you!". Really?

On Apr 21, 4:20*pm, Orlando Enrique Fiol wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:
All well and good for those who never got fat in the first place.
Getting fat in the first place changes the situation. *What once was
okay is no longer okay.


That may be your plan, but I'm not prepared to give up on fruits entirely.. I
can do without all processed sugars and starches, but not fruit.

Bananas may be fine for those who have never gotten fat in the first place.


Getting fat in the first place changes that. That's how illnesses often work.

Obesity is a disfunction of the metabolism and one of the symptoms of
that disorder, for those of us who succeed with low carb, is that some
foods that were harmless before we got fat in the first place are now
harmful.


It highly depends on each individual. For some, fruit consumption does not
impede weight loss and is therefore not harmful. For others, even one bite of
fruit can bring about a stall. There are so many contributing factors toward
obesity that it is ludicrous to single out fruits as being harmful merely
because they contain sugars. Once again, look at the kinds of diets that have
produced obesity; they do not consist of natural, raw and obviously unsweetened
fruits. I entirely understand your position that tolerable foods become harmful
after we get fat. But, nearly everyone on any flavor of low-carb diet struggles
with the inescapable reality that they don't want to eat strictly low-carb for
the rest of their lives. This is why all low-carb plans eventually include
fruits, vegetables and even some whole grains in their maintenance phases.. What
you're suggesting works in an induction phase, but is not meant to be followed
for years.

But just how beneficial are bananas even for those who have never got
fat in the first place? *If we use the model of how foods work in the
wild then to eat bananas a person would have to search through a jungle
to find them. *That includes climbing trees to evade leopards, throwing
sharp sticks at small animals, then encountering small numbers of banana
plants that happen to have non-ripe bananas ready for the eating.
That's not the story of a modern human eating a banana. *And it's
definitely not the story of a modern human who has already gotten fat
and who therefore can't handle sugar in any quantity any more.


By the same token, we should not eat meat without first chasing and hunting it.
I love your double standard. When I suggest that fruits are entirely natural
foods meant to be eaten by humans and animals alike, you reply that we no
longer eat fruits under natural conditions. Yet, you have no problem eating
vast quantities of meat that is raised, slaughtered, packaged and sold under
entirely unnatural conditions previously unknown to humanity.

Someone who never got fat in the first place should not eat a pile of
bananas twice the size of their head because that much fruit will give
them the runs. *Someone already fat and carb sensative should avoid the
first banana during their loss phases and possibly even during
maintenance depending on how carb sensative they are.


Finally, you're talking sense.

Orlando



One major factor that you are overlooking here is that in terms of
carbs, today's banana has little resemblence to the banana of 5,000
years ago. The same is true with virtually every other fruit.
Today's fruits have been bred by man to be sweeter, bigger, tastier,
disease resistant, etc and in terms of the evolution clock, that has
essentially just happened. That changes everything. They are higher
in carbs and second, it's far easier to eat a whole lot of them
because they taste good. If you were presented with many of the
fruits from 5,000+ years ago today, you would likely spit most of them
out. Did you ever taste a wild grape versus today's seedless?

Also, how many fruits do you think were readily available to man?
Some were available occasionally, for brief periods, seasonally.
Those were the ones that didn't succumb to insects, disease, getting
eaten by wild animals, etc. Today we have supermarkets stocked with
the sweetest fruits imaginable available year round.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting that you can't have some fruit
on a LC diet. And the better your choices as to which fruits, the more
you can have. But as others have done the math, that one fruit
smoothie contains close to an entire days worth of carbs for many
people on maintenance. A far better choice in terms of carb count
would be a cup of strawberries with some whipped cream on top.