A storm has been brewing for a while in the raw food movement and that is the question of fruit vs fat.
Yes, we all love fruit. We’re hardwired for sweetness. Its moist, hydrating, tasty, aroma-filled and beautifully coloured. It appeals to all our senses.
But fruit comes with a surprise package called sugar and that sugar imposes a duty upon us; those of us who use fruit as our main source of calories must exercise.
Maybe for some people this is no big deal, they love exercise; they would exercise if they didn’t have to; they would exercise just for fun. But for others, exercise is something that is merely endured. They are not used to it, only do it out of a sense of duty, or don’t do it at all and make excuses for why it can’t be done today. Someone in this latter group, especially if they have become a raw foodist for health reasons, needs to either reconsider their view on exercise, or eat a reduced fruit raw food diet.
Why am I making this claim?
Fruit, for all its super powers, vitamins, antioxidants and pure water is very high in carbohydrate, especially simple sugars called fructose. It wouldn’t even matter if it were more complex carbs that released more slowly, the fact is that carbohydrates turn into sugar. Because fruit is so low in calories, we have to eat much more of it. A typical 80/10/10 meal, for example, contains 500g of carbohydrate, all entering the blood stream as sugar in the course of any one day. This is about the equivalent carbohydrate load as eating 1.8kg of cooked pasta each day.
When carbohydrate enters the blood stream as glucose, it requires preferential treatment from the body in order to burn the sugar. This is because sugar is very dangerous to the body, it quickly increases acidity, fermentation and becomes a choice food for parasites and bacteria. Our bodies want to get rid of sugar at any cost, so our pancreas releases a hormone called insulin whose single goal is to get the cells to open up and let the sugar in.
But sometimes, our cells don’t want to open up and let the sugar in. This is called insulin resistance, and this is also where the exercise comes in. A person who does not exercise is going to meet with some form of insulin resistance, irrespective of whether the fruit is eaten all at once, or in a number of small meals.
Let me provide an analogy of why our cells might not want to open up and let the sugar in.
Say a cell is like your fridge. You do a big shop and the fridge is overflowing with delicious fruits and greens and coconuts and root vegetables and oils and whatever else you might have bought. When your fridge is empty you can put food in it. When it’s half full you can still put food in it. But once its full you really have to force food in there. Lets say you forgot you went shopping and then went shopping for a second time! You have to start rearranging things, taking some things out, cramming things in. Eventually you just can’t fit any more in that fridge. The fridge has reached its capacity.
It’s the same with cells. If a cell is empty the insulin can come along and throw in some sugar. If a cell is already full but more sugar is consumed then the body creates more insulin and tries to jam the sugar into the cells. If even more sugar is consumed the body gives up and the sugar is converted into fat and stored in the stomach area as a kind of TODO list – I’ll burn this when I get around to it.
If you are lean but have stomach fat, that is the reason why, it is excess carbohydrate that could not fit into your cells!
So now your body is in a state where the cells are full of sugar and the excess sugar has been mopped up and stored as fat. The body then goes about slowly burning the sugar that is already in the cells, because sugar is burned first before the body considers fat. Perhaps overnight the body finishes burning all the sugar in the cells and the cells are empty again the next morning.
But now, some sugar has been stored as fat. Maybe not much as a raw foodist, but if you didn’t exercise at all, then there is a good chance that some will have been stored as fat. This fat is then released into the blood stream so that the body can finally start to burn it off. But wait! In comes more sugar for breakfast; someone who eats fruit as their main source of calories is eating sugar around the clock.
In this case, the cells are empty, but there is fat in the blood from yesterday’s sugar consumption hanging around. This fat blocks the cell’s insulin receptors, so now the insulin has a little bit of difficulty in getting the sugar into the cells. As a result, the pancreas makes more insulin to try to knock out some of the blocked receptor sites.
If you are eating a diet where your main source of calories are fruit and you are not exercising, you will have a downwards spiral of excess sugar becoming fat, fat blocking insulin receptors, more insulin being created, the cells getting tired of being hammered with insulin and then eventually the cells becoming insulin resistant and more and more sugar being converted into fat.
This is why some of the raw food teachers, lovely as they are, who do not like to exercise but do consume fruit as their main source of calories, are overweight. You wouldn’t think you could become overweight from bananas and strawberries would you!
So what is the solution for this fruit eating dilemma? If you want to eat fruit this is what you’re going to have to do:
Firstly, aerobic exercise requires all of the muscle cells in your body to kick into gear and start providing the energy you need in order to sustain the activity. If your cells are full of sugar then this is the first thing they will burn. They will not only burn the sugar already in the cell, but they’ll also open the door and usher in new molecules of sugar. The insulin can pretty much sit back and watch, the pancreas doesn’t need to get involved. As long as you’re moving and burning sugar you can consume sugar in the form of fruit without any problems.
If you stop moving however, the cells fill up again. That’s where the second trick comes in…
That is to increase the number of muscle cells you have in your body! If you had two fridges in your home, it would not be such a big deal if you went shopping twice. The first lot of shopping can go in the first fridge and the second lot of shopping can go in the second fridge. So it is with muscle cells. If you create new ones, you can store some sugar in each of the new cells as well as in the original cells, and so if you are still eating the same quantity of sugar you will not need much insulin to force sugar into the cells. Increasing the number of muscle cells requires resistance exercise such as weight lifting.
So if we do enough aerobic exercise and resistance exercise we should, given this simplistic example, be able to eat fruit without any side effects such as abdominal fat gain, candida albicans, PCOS, diabetes or any other blood sugar disorders.
How much exercise is enough exercise? This I don’t know, but if you are eating fruit and other carbohydrates and you are gaining weight around your stomach area or having any blood sugar related issues, then you are not doing enough.
For some people, if they have a sedentary occupation and perhaps also a sedentary hobby and don’t do exercise, or if a person is physically incapable of doing exercise, then a high fruit diet might not actually work for them. Do not believe teachers who say that everyone can eat a high fruit diet, some people are pre-disposed to having blood sugar issues and these people will have to exercise more, perhaps more than they are able to do given their daily schedule. Some people just can’t exercise.
For any who fits in this category, you can still be a raw foodist! More and more scientific studies are starting to extol the virtues of eating higher levels of fats, particularly anti-inflammatory fats containing essential fatty acids, and if not coupled with a diet high in fruit and sugars, the body can switch over to become a wonderful fat burning machine. Couple raw fats and proteins with life giving vegetables and a small amount of lower sugar fruits such as berries and you have a wide range of delicious meal options and excellent health to look forward to. Fats can be more readily utilised by a sedentary person, as long as that person is not consuming sugar.
We are so fortunate to have such highly intelligent bodies that work all this out for us!
So the moral of the story is, you can choose fruit or you can choose fat, or have a balance of both. Your body will happily work with either. But there is a caveat, and that is: if your calories are coming from sugar, you have to exercise.
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