Is It Possible To Eat Too Much Fruit?

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was, briefly and famously, an ardent fruitarian—meaning he ate a diet composed primarily of fruit, which he believed would cleanse his body of harmful fluids. Just as famously, the actor Ashton Kutcher tried adopting Jobs’s fruit-centric diet, until he ended up in the hospital with an out-of-whack pancreas. So is it bad for your health to eat a lot of fruit? Though a famous study from 1980 argued that based on the evolution of human jaws and teeth, our ancient ancestors used to eat a diet dominated by fruit, there’s not a lot of good evidence for or against fruit-heavy diets for modern humans. “There are some people out there who are fruitarians, and from what we can tell they’re perfectly healthy,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist and professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. (However, full-blown fruitarianism is so restrictive that it has been linked to nutritional deficiencies in some people, and may be unsafe for children and those with certain medical conditions, like diabetes.) But for healthy adults, experts say that eating lots and lots of fruit is unlikely to get you into trouble, as long as it’s part of a normal diet. The main concern with overeating fruit is its natural sugar. While fruit is certainly high in the sweet stuff, research has consistently linked whole fruit consumption to a reduced risk for obesity and other metabolic diseases, sa...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Diet/Nutrition healthytime Source Type: news