Hello,
Over ten years running our little company, Jenny and I have become very worried about what America’s food system is doing to our health. We want to shed light on what we’ve seen that most Americans probably don’t realize.
Today’s focus: How you get your fruit matters!
Let’s start with a snacking tip: If you’re craving a healthy, sweet snack, choose whole fruit instead of juice or a smoothie. And run, don’t walk, away from fruit snacks. Here’s why:
A study in the Journal of Nutrition compared people who ate a whole apple, pureed apple or equivalent amount of apple juice. Those who ate the fruit in its natural form felt fuller for longer! They also had lower cravings to eat again over a 4+ hour span. Feeling fuller with less cravings means that piece of fruit will do a better job helping you control unwanted snacking during the day than juice or a smoothie. Not to mention, it’s probably a lot cheaper than store bought and less messy than making a smoothie (does anyone enjoy cleaning their blender??).
That’s not all. Store-bought smoothies are usually filled with highly processed fruit juices. Sugary juice translates into serious blood sugar spikes, because when the juice was made, all the beneficial fiber was either broken down or removed. Plus, juice is a condensed form of simple carbs that you can consume faster than nature intended–I bet you’d rarely eat three oranges in a matter of minutes, but a single glass contains the sugary juice of up to three oranges! And fluids pass through your digestive system faster than solids.
So a supposedly “healthy” smoothie you just paid so much for may be causing a big blood sugar spike, followed by a large insulin spike. Neither of those things is good for your health or energy levels, and if repeated over and over will eventually contribute to insulin resistance and diabetes.
Fruit snacks can be even more misleading. The labeling makes you think you’re buying something good for your family’s health because of the “made with real fruit” claims. But they’re usually made with sugary fruit juice or highly processed fruit purees. And whatever health benefits that fruit content might offer is outweighed by the fact they’re low in fiber and loaded with corn syrup, sugar and all sorts of modified starches.
And snack brands can legally be very tricky with how they write the ingredient list. They’ll often split the amount of added sugar between two ingredients like cane sugar and corn syrup, so that separately each of those two ingredients fall lower in the list of ingredients than the fruit juice or puree. That makes it look like fruit is the first ingredient, even though more of the product is made up of the combined added sugars from those two ingredients! Are you ok with that kind of tricky labeling? We aren’t!
Massive snack companies employ food scientists who formulate snacks that trick our taste buds into thinking we’re getting something nutritious. But the snacks contain very little actual nutrition.
Those products are often made in the cheapest way possible with the cheapest ingredients possible, then marketed by celebrities we trust as having health benefits. At the end of the day, consumers like you and me are being convinced to eat something that’s less healthy than the simple, straightforward natural whole food . And we’re just lining shareholder pockets in the process.
So next time you’re craving something sweet and tangy, instead of fruit juice or a smoothie or fruit snacks, take a second to consider reaching for a sweet, delicious piece of whole fruit, instead.
Tom