No fruit

#1

I understand Why to eliminate fruit on keto. Question… is it detrimental in any way?? It just seems the natural Food for Humans. I understand it’s the sugar factor,…but in the end, is there any consequence to the body by eliminating fruit?
Other than berries what are your experieces in satisfying a fruit craving? I’m looking at keto smoothies. Any suggestions?
Thanks

#2

I eat fruit, like everything, they’re not all created equal. But eating fruit in normal amounts and drinking smoothies aren’t really the same either, usually smoothies are massive amounts of super sugar loaded ones, or they wouldn’t taste good.

You also need to keep in mind that as long as you keep your liver glycogen loaded, you stall ketosis so you need to be aware how much you eat. My fruits/carbs are pre/post my workouts so it’s strategic, but I wouldn’t eat a bunch of them on an off day while hanging around the house either.

(Joey) #3

Great question, and a good reply above from @lfod14. I’ll add a few thoughts…

Inherently, fruit in its whole form can be a perfectly healthy part of an eating pattern. The challenge comes down to “part” and “whole form.”

Fruit occurs naturally during a narrow window of the cycle of seasons. Depending on where you live it varies. But as a means to store up carbs (as body fat) for the upcoming lean months of winter (viz. hibernation in bears), fruit plays a valuable role.

Unfortunately, we’ve made fruit available (in bumped-up forms through breeding) throughout the year. There’s never a chance to work it off through the lean months if you never have any lean months. So, the cumulative effect is the tendency to eat too much fruit throughout the entire year. Not really a very healthy ingredient in a diet that also has plenty of fat (i.e., keto) for primary energy.

The second consideration is that a smoothie does not represent fruit in its natural form. The fiber gets all smashed up and the fructose content is no longer shielded from immediate digestion. Put differently, the glycemic index of the fruit skyrockets.

The difference in what a whole apple does to your insulin level and what the apple’s juice + pulp (once processed in a blender) does to your insulin level is markedly different.

There’s nothing good you’re doing to yourself by drinking your fruit. Why not just eat the fruit whole and get the benefit of the fiber - both to shield the fructose shock to your system and to assist in digestive tract function (debatable, to be sure, but hard to imagine that whole fruit fiber is disadvantageous unless you have a condition, perhaps diverticulitis).

So, in short, although I rarely eat fruit personally, on that very rare occasion that I do, it’s only whole fruit - never juice/smoothie - and it’s going to be a few berries of some sort. Limited in amount, since I’m eating lots of fat (along with sufficient protein).

On a separate note, the sweetness of fruit is something you’re better off not craving - and eating some routinely is likely to significantly increase the craving response in many folks. If you’re one of those folk, you’re not doing yourself any great favor if you’re trying to stay on the keto WOE path, either.

Best wishes! :vulcan_salute:

(Marianne) #4

Although I never loved most fruits, there were a bunch that I did really enjoy and miss. My keto program from the beginning, however, was based mostly on my carb (and fat) macro. I kept the total carbs as low under 20g/day as I could, even now (three years). That didn’t allow for really any fruit for the carbs I wanted to sacrifice, and so I haven’t had a piece in that time. I know for many people, that wouldn’t be manageable, but for me, it’s been a trade off. Would I like certain kinds of fruit (and other carby things)? - yes, but I do not indulge in them, ever. Again, that’s me. It’s a trade off. I traded my fruit, sugar and carb compulsions for HFLC foods. With that came a deliverance from carb and sugar cravings, which makes the idea of these things just a thought I can easily put out of my mind for something else delicious on plan.

Good luck to you!

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #5

The only consequence is that eliminating fruit removes the burden fructose puts on our liver. Although some researchers feel that the fibre in whole fruits protects the liver somewhat by slowing down the absorption of fructose, I try to eat it rarely. I did enough damage to my liver with alcohol; I don’t need to be perpetuating the damage by overdoing fruit.

Certainly drinking our fruit is a terrible idea, since the fibre has been either removed or destroyed and is no longer present to protect us from the fructose. (This is why paediatric obesity specialists forbid their patients to drink anything but milk or water; the fructose in soda pop and fruit juices causes a great deal of the metabolic damage kids experience from eating the standard diet.)

As for the idea that fruit is “the” natural food for humans, consider the facts that (1) for most of our two million years as a separate species fruit would have been available only for a very small percentage of the year, and (2) most fruits would have had little of the nutritional value that present-day commercial fruits have been bred (i.e., genetically modified) to have. If wouldn’t be the first commercial product for which a need had to be invented, so that people would buy the product.

Given that beef contains all the essential amino acids and essential fatty acids that the human body requires for life, and contains them in all the correct proportions, I’d say that if any food deserved to be called “the natural food for humans,” it would be beef.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #6

Bear in mind, though, that the effect on insulin is caused by glucose; fructose, on the other hand, goes direct to the liver, where it causes damage when consumed in excess. It also has an addictive effect on the brain in many people.

#7

I eat whatever fruit I want, it’s not like I have the self control and even intention to stop it… I can’t not eat fruit.
But it always was very tiny and after I tried carnivore, I don’t even need it every day. When it’s off season, it’s easier but as I am very much surrounded with fruits and bake with fruits and everything, it’s not THAT easy. I don’t crave them, I just can’t avoid eating them, it just happens…? :smiley:

Well I consider myself a healthy one and see zero problem in eating a tiny fruit here and there. Not alone and really not much. We are all different and some people need a very different attitude. Fruit isn’t needed but it’s nice. I am lucky enough to have the luxury of choice.

Other than berries? Well, barred melons and dried fruits, I find everything okay for myself. My big fav as a beginner ketoer was banana (frozen. it’s a berry btw unlike many stuff with the name “berry” in their names). I liked carbier fruits and vegs as they had usually way more flavor so way less were enough. Cauliflower? Couldn’t stop below 40g carbs (at least when I made riced cauliflower. it was the bare minimum and still felt it was just a taste). Frozen banana? 2-3g is PLENTY. So it’s very individual and I always say amounts matter a lot.
Now I don’t want banana anymore, actually my number one fruit is lemon now :smiley: And I don’t use it so often :smiley: But so many years passed and I changed.

Oh don’t let me talk about fruits, I never will shut up. I have a very extensive fruit garden and I LOVE my fruits.

I can’t see why 3g sugar from fruit would be worse than the same from vegs and I am not against vegs (I just avoid them as they aren’t good for me, too many carbs and I gain basically nothing but hunger. I have eggs and meat for nutrients)…

Mentally/emotionally… It’s very individual. I NEEDED my banana to feel free enough to stay (for a while). I missed my vegs (only spent 25g net carbs for them and it was less than minimal to me as I basically hate green leaves and needed lots of carbier vegs anyway… I mean, lots of kinds, I used them in moderation) and eating raw vegs and banana helped with this single harship on my keto in the beginning. It was a great idea from my part. I would have quit way earlier without. So it doesn’t matter what others think, it’s your life, your feelings, your individual body and experience.

I consider my fruit juices a great idea too (anyway, one need to drink the juice from the cans :slight_smile: I preserve very much fruit, my SO use them up but the liquid remains). They are TINY. I have, like, 15-20ml in a glass, the rest is carbonated water. In most case it’s pretty sweet and very nice and refreshing. I understand fruit juice is serious thing even without anything added, I mean super quick carbs and whatnot but AMOUNTS MATTER and I have it along with my main meal.
Don’t just drink “proper” fruit juice unless you are knowing what are you doing.

If I want a refreshing fruit drink and really don’t want to spend carbs on it, I put a few lemon drops into my glass of water but it’s me :smiley:

I see there were words about the timing already… I always feel even less worried when I grab a rosehip or two (it’s a bother so never more :D) during my long walks :wink: No way that would cause any problems :smiley:

It starts in June and ends in December (but continues until March for rosehips). I wouldn’t call that narrow, honestly. It’s not wild fruit, it is my garden but still. (I don’t have much in November and December but the main fruit is very, very sugary.)
Even wild fruits are available for most of the year - but they are usually tart and the amount is tiny so they can’t give us much carbs, that’s true.

#8

What does it have to do with our fat consumption? I am confused.
(But the more sugar I eat, the more fat I need to eat so maybe that’s one reason why I don’t get it…?)

And a whole apple is a huge amount, my body had temper tantrums with slight sugar poison symptoms (very temporal so it probably wasn’t really that) after half an apple :smiley: Or 20g grapes, that was pretty surprising though it IS almost pure sugar from the viewpoint of my tastebuds…
So I couldn’t handle a whole apple either way. By the way, apple is special to me, no idea WHY. My body complained about it ages ago. I could eat a few bananas without feeling unwell or a lot of acidic sugary fruit but a whole apple was problematic… Odd.

I usually simply follow my body as it has a very good idea about what it wants and isn’t shy to tell me. Useful.

I agree. It may be a sign we crave sugar (or something sweet) and we should “unlearn” that. Probably. (I am open, maybe some people are fine embracing their sweet tooth, who knows?)
I enjoy fruit and whenever I manage to desire it (rare after trying out carnivore), it’s not for the sugar part, it’s despite it. I so would love if some of my fruits in my garden would be less sweet though completely without sugar they would be odd I guess… I love the juiciness, the crunch if they have it, I enjoy the shape and smell and the knowledge I watched them since they were just a tiny bud… (Actually these last things are enjoyable without eating my fruit and it’s cool.) So eating a bit of radish is almost as good, it has crunch and taste and juiciness. Sweetness isn’t that important for me anymore. I never could stop eating sweets on keto (until carnivore*) but some people would do better to stop that, go cold turkey if possible. But if it’s impossible… Try to find the smallest evil.

*It turned out I want sweets only if I eat much plant carbs (I mean, not 1g or something. a slice of radish don’t have that effect but a keto veggie dish is different). I needed sweets due to not having meat. So carnivore was amazing to me regarding my sweet food consumption including fruits (they aren’t sweets to me, they were a separate group but I stopped needing them when I swapped my plants with meat. I couldn’t not eat fruits on vegetarian keto, I missed them very much).

But carnivore was a big jump and needed a longer evolution.
Still, it may be a good idea to try to drop carbs even more if possible when there is a fruit/sweets problem. It may sound harder - but it may be easier. I am a different person with different desires when I eat very little plant food. But maybe it’s the timing or the amount of fat that makes one peckish (well it makes sense to eat proper food then but it’s not always that simple and clear).

#9

Milk is horribly sugary though, I rather drink my tiny fruit juice, fructose or not. Well okay, almost no one thinks about my style of fruit juice consumption… :smiley: I had times when I felt a Queen of Ridiculous Amounts. Now it’s so normal for me to drink 5ml rum (we had to share 4ml with my SO a few days ago… it was fine with us, it was a very good, flavorful rum. I would drink 5ml all alone if I could though :D) or 10ml blackberry juice (it is so very colorful even in a glass of water, I love that… I don’t like blackberry much but it has its uses).

If it’s milk… Well I have a long history with drinking 1 liter milk at once, I still can do it…

(It’s just like my cauliflower vs banana thing, banana brings a fragment of the carbs and less problems so it’s better.)

Sorry I go away now…
BUT I know many people can drink milk galore and it’s sugary… And people may be sensitive to it as well… Most people are as far as I know.

Just one more thing, it’s not fruit.

Given that beef contains all the essential amino acids and essential fatty acids that the human body requires for life

What about the other meats? There were people living on other meat, not beef so they must be good too… I have read many times beef is superior but what other meats lack? They are complete proteins and probably are good at micronutrients… (As my beloved eggs are complete too but they lack certain micronutrients - tly lack vitamin C, has not enough from some others though IDK the needs on carnivore for them - so one can’t live on them for long.)

#10

Really. I am bit surprised.? Are there any studies on this or testing? Any more that cooking or chewing?

#11

fruit is a sugar draw for so many but if you want ‘a tad’ research the ‘lowest GI fruit’ and stick to those. Control that sugar intake TIGHT when it comes to fruits. They take more from ya then give ya :slight_smile:

don’t smoothie out, like others said that is ALOT in that smoothie that won’t ever equal just a small handful of raspberries or blueberries when wanted.

plus if you up your fat intake or eat, say, 6 slices of bacon when ya want that fruit, good chance your desire for that fruit will leave. So to think, eat fat and meat first before sugar intake is always good, but if you want some fruit in your life thru your lifestyle, lowest GI index point blank…it limits your choices and you know where you stand. It becomes very personal to you and how you wanna roll forward in your lifestyle change.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #12

There are two concerns where smoothies and fruit juices are concerned.

The first is that the fibre has been mechanically destroyed, or even removed altogether (which helps prevent spoilage in commercial products).

The second is that consequently, even a fairly small glass of juice, not to mention the quantity of juice in a smoothie, contains far more fructose than it would be possible to consume in the form of whole fruit.

If fructose is consumed at a slow enough rate, it does no damage to the liver. But it is easy to overwhelm the metabolic pathway involved. Occasionally burdening this pathway, allowing plenty of time for recovery in between, is one thing, but a constant onslaught of fructose/alcohol/branched chain amino acids (all of which are handled the same in the liver) causes a process called de novo lipogenesis, and the resulting accumulation of fat leads to the progression of fatty liver disease, steatohepatitis, cirrhosis, and (eventually) death.

The good news is that the liver is highly resilient. A small experiment on obese children with fatty liver disease, in which fructose was replaced by other (not particularly healthy) foods, showed that their fatty liver disease was reversed in a remarkably short period of time, around ten days or so, if I recall. The details are described (along with the reference to the published report) in Dr. Robert Lustig’s lecture, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” and several of his other lectures available on YouTube. It was his clinical team at UCSF that did the study.

#13

I do understand the juice part or the concerns about processed products…And interesting about drinking sugar and how that changes thins. But the implication here is that fiber gets broken down “fiber gets smashed up” and made into non fiber by blending it… which was what I wondered about.

(Joey) #14

Are you asking for studies or tests demonstrating that fruit juice has a higher glycemic index than the same quantity of whole fruit? You bet…

Results are widely available, such as: https://glycemic-index.net/

Glycemic Index (GI) of apple juice = 41
compared to GI of whole apple = 4.5

As for chewing effect, yes, that is the primary reason that gylcemic indices between mechanically processed ingredients have a higher index than their original sources. It’s the chewing (or blender, osterizer, food smasher) that breaks down the fiber and makes the carbohydrate more immediately available and digestible, at least to human digestive system (vs. a ruminant animal, like a cow).

On a related note, that’s why the distinction between gross carbs and net-of-fiber carbs is a distinction worth understanding.

Cooking, yes that’s another topic, but same outcome - directionally speaking.

(Joey) #15

The context in which you eat fruit (carbs) matters significantly. So yes, the amount of fruit you eat can have a markedly different effect on how your dietary fat is handled, metabolically speaking.

More specifically, by eating carbs as one’s primary fuel source, dietary fat gets lowest priority as a source of energy (so it ultimately gets stored as adipose tissue and organ fat). OTOH, if you’re not eating all that fruit and carbs, the same dietary fat gets burned efficiently rather than stored.

Hope this addresses any confusion.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #16

Another factor is that a high-speed blender can damage the fibre much more thoroughly than chewing.

Cattle, by the way, can’t digest fibre any better than we can, but they have four stomachs, the first of which (the rumen, whence the term “ruminate”) is a fermenting vat that allows bacterial action to convert the fibre into fatty acids, which they can digest. The mechanical process of rumination (regurgitating and chewing the cud) slowly breaks the fibre down, giving the bacteria better and faster access. Apparently, when cattle are given grain or finely-ground rations, they have little need to ruminate, since the ruminal bacteria already have easy access to the fibre.

#17

I had a shocking reaction to fruit yesterday and I didn’t even eat it. I was peeling apples for some kugel that I won’t be allowed to consume. Afterwards, without thinking, I checked my blood glucose and ketones, something I still do every few days. I hit an astonishing 225. After I washed my hands and tried again it was actually 83. In the future I will take more seriously the handwashing advice that came with my keto mojo.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #18

LOL! :+1:

(Joey) #19

Ha! Excellent advice :slight_smile:

Sorry, but I’m also picturing trying to perform a finger blood test with hands full of unbaked kugel mix. :wink:

(Joey) #20

Thanks for this! I assumed cattle could digest fiber itself, not that it was the gut bacteria that did the actual fiber digestion. Makes even more sense to me now.

… which makes me wonder…

Given the wide range of gut biomes across individual humans, and our wide range of reactions to fiber, perhaps there’s a connection between having more or less of those bacteria that can do the fiber digestion? :thinking: