fruit has twice the effect of vegetables on mortality risk per serving.
Huh?
I rather suspect fruit here is working a proxy for something else (maybe wealth).
Nutritionally, the major difference between fruits and vegetables is that fruits have MUCH more sugar. In particular, fructose which doesn’t have a sterling reputation, to put it mildly.
Yup. Surprised me a bit too when I first saw it. Fructose effects are not linear. The liver has some ability to process a certain amount of fructose every day, it is going well beyond this limit that is harmful. 5 servings of fruit is probably going to be 30-50g of fructose, which has been proposed as the approximate amount we can process.
Yes, I understand there are studies. That doesn’t make me trust their conclusion. I don’t have time to dig into these papers right now, but I wonder how well they controlled for e.g. socioeconomic status and latitude.
Wealth doesn’t look likely to me—vegetables aren’t a lot cheaper than fruit where I live, unless we’re talking potatoes and such, and those usually aren’t counted as vegetables in these analyses.
I would be interested in what fruits and vegetables are respectively displacing in the diet. If a lot of these people are eating fruit for dessert instead of e.g. cake, or for breakfast in place of Pop Tarts, then dramatic longevity effects wouldn’t surprise me but also wouldn’t be an unqualified endorsement of more fruit for everyone.
Carrots, cabbage, onions, squash—not cheaper than fruit?
I just looked these up on Safeway’s online store for my area, and found carrots at about 80 cents a pound, cabbage at a buck a pound, onions at about 56 cents and squash at about a dollar. (You can squeeze a bit more out of some of these if you’re buying in 10-pound increments, but I consider that impractical for individuals or small families.) Compare to cheap apples at $1.09 a pound, grapefruit at $0.66, or bananas at about $0.85.
Fruit does go a lot higher—if you’re buying berries or tropical fruit, you can easily be spending five or six bucks a pound. But if you’re mainly looking for frugality, you have plenty of options in each category. I expect this to be skewed a bit by season, too—there aren’t many cold-season fruits.
Huh?
I rather suspect fruit here is working a proxy for something else (maybe wealth).
Nutritionally, the major difference between fruits and vegetables is that fruits have MUCH more sugar. In particular, fructose which doesn’t have a sterling reputation, to put it mildly.
http://jn.nutrition.org/content/136/10/2588.short
http://www.neurology.org/content/65/8/1193.short
Yup. Surprised me a bit too when I first saw it. Fructose effects are not linear. The liver has some ability to process a certain amount of fructose every day, it is going well beyond this limit that is harmful. 5 servings of fruit is probably going to be 30-50g of fructose, which has been proposed as the approximate amount we can process.
The Perfect Health Diet people largely agree. http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2012/01/is-it-good-to-eat-sugar/
Their recommendation is a max of 25g fructose or 15% of carbohydrates should be fructose.
Yes, I understand there are studies. That doesn’t make me trust their conclusion. I don’t have time to dig into these papers right now, but I wonder how well they controlled for e.g. socioeconomic status and latitude.
Wealth doesn’t look likely to me—vegetables aren’t a lot cheaper than fruit where I live, unless we’re talking potatoes and such, and those usually aren’t counted as vegetables in these analyses.
I would be interested in what fruits and vegetables are respectively displacing in the diet. If a lot of these people are eating fruit for dessert instead of e.g. cake, or for breakfast in place of Pop Tarts, then dramatic longevity effects wouldn’t surprise me but also wouldn’t be an unqualified endorsement of more fruit for everyone.
Carrots, cabbage, onions, squash—not cheaper than fruit?
But yes, I don’t think it’s purely a matter of money but may be a matter of culture as well.
Yep, a very good point.
I just looked these up on Safeway’s online store for my area, and found carrots at about 80 cents a pound, cabbage at a buck a pound, onions at about 56 cents and squash at about a dollar. (You can squeeze a bit more out of some of these if you’re buying in 10-pound increments, but I consider that impractical for individuals or small families.) Compare to cheap apples at $1.09 a pound, grapefruit at $0.66, or bananas at about $0.85.
Fruit does go a lot higher—if you’re buying berries or tropical fruit, you can easily be spending five or six bucks a pound. But if you’re mainly looking for frugality, you have plenty of options in each category. I expect this to be skewed a bit by season, too—there aren’t many cold-season fruits.