Diet Myth #6: EVERYTHING NATURAL IS GOOD FOR YOU

DIET MYTH #6: EVERYTHING NATURAL IS GOOD FOR YOU How many times have you been told to “eat your fruits and vegetables”? It’s almost as if “fruits and vegetables” have become a single word. The only problem is that from a nutrient perspective, fruits and vegetables are about as similar as chairs and batteries. People like to flaunt how good fruits are by calling them “nature’s candy,” but in truth, fruits have more in common with candy than they do with vegetables. Fruits are mostly made of sugar and water, with a smidgen of fiber, while vegetables are low in sugar and extremely high in nutrients. The biggest problem with fruits is the main sugar they contain, fructose. Your liver converts fructose to either glucose or triglycerides, the latter of which is then stored as fat. Fructose not only causes you to gain fat through these biochemical pathways, but also doesn’t curb your appetite after you eat it, the way protein and fats do. Fructose isn’t even as filling as other sugar sources, so you’re more likely to consume more of it than any other type of sugar. There are not many ways to cause a food craving faster than to eat or drink something with a whole lot of fructose like dried fruit, fruit juice, soda, or even a piece of whole fruit. Eating fructose doesn’t just cause food cravings; it can contribute to heart disease and damage your arteries in a number of ways. The first is by increasing triglycerides, a well established predictor of heart disease. Fructose also easily binds to fats and to proteins such as collagen, a main connective tissue in the skin and arteries. When linking to collagen, fructose creates toxic advanced glycation end products, or AGEs for short (glycation refers to the binding of sugar molecules with proteins, DNA, and fats). These are well deserving of the name, as these end products play a role in the aging process and create additional oxidative stress in the body. AGEs are a major cause of skin wrinkles, and they also age arteries and can lead to atherosclerosis (a type of hardening of the arteries). Fructose is also damaging to the body because it feeds candida, the bad bacteria in your gut. When fructose enters the gut, candida eat it and reproduce. This contributes a great deal to the developing problem of small intestinal bacterial growth (SIBO). Some of the bad bacteria that love fructose create uric acid as a by-product of their own metabolism. When too much uric acid builds up, it can lead to deposits throughout the body, and you can develop gout, one of the most painful and debilitating forms of arthritis. In mainstream medicine, the health benefits of fruit are overstated while the health risks of fructose are totally ignored, but there are some doctors out there who have begun warning about the pitfalls of fructose. Eating any more than a little bit of fructose daily is simply not good for your brain or your body, and that is why the Bulletproof diet limits fructose to no more than twenty five grams a day and preferably less. That’s roughly the amount of two large apples. Avoiding excessive fructose is one of the best things you can do to slim your waistline and extinguish food cravings. So much for “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Instead, we should be saying, “three apples a day keeps the doctor well paid.”