The Benefits of Losing Weight

I write posts about weight lose because so many people want to lose weight.  They want to look better and feel better. As a senior I want to tell you that until you’re over 50 you don’t realize how that extra weight affects you.

I lost most of my body fat after 50, but for a lot of people, that’s almost too late. Today I have knee pain because I waited too long to lose weight. The damage is done. I had one operation on my left knee, but the truth about any joint surgery is that you never totally get rid of the pain. Oh, sure after the surgery you’ll feel great but as time goes by you start to feel the pain again. I’m probably looking at a total joint replacement.

If I would have exercised and watched my diet more and lost the weight before I had joint damage, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. For most of us, gaining weight is no biggy. "Everyone will gain weight when they get older, don’t they?" No, the truth is that as you get older, life gets more complicated. We have less time for ourselves. We start to neglect our health, there are more important things going on. 

So, yes as you get older your life does get more complicated. And you can’t do everything. We tend to only do those things that take priority. It’s like my old boss; as his job became harder, it seemed like all he had time for was to go around putting out fires. (taking care of problems). That’s what the life of a busy person looks like. And when that happens to you, stress will build up and to release the stress you indulge yourself more and try to spend more time trying to chill-out. Your watching more TV or reading novels; just doing things that help you take your mind off your stressful life. 

Actually, the best way to relieve stress is to exercise. Even walking 30 minutes will release stress. Any activity you can do to get your body moving and something that can take your mind off your life for a while. How can walking help? you might ask. After a couple weeks of walking and you get into the routine, you want to walk fast enough to elevate your heart rate. This is were a fitness tracker comes in. If you have ever noticed joggers will be checking their pulse and that’s because to burn fat you have to exercise at your target heart rate. 

You can check the internet; search target heart rate and it can tell you how to calculate “target heart rate”. The simplest way I know is 220 minus your age; but if you're under a doctor's care and are taking medication, your Doctor will tell you what a safe “target heart rate” is for you. 

I walk slower for 5 minutes to warm-up, the 20 minutes at my target heart rate, and then 5 minutes to cool-down. That type of workout will burn calories and help you feel better and become a healthier person.

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books. 

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

Losing Your Fat?

If you have been trying to lose weight for any length of time you probably know by now that it's all about losing body fat. Losing body fat will keep you from regaining the weight. There is nothing more discouraging than losing 40 pounds and you're still fat. I've written several posts lately about your diet and that is a big part of weight loss; today I want to write about exercise. First of all, I lost my fat over 3 or 4 months and because I have a small percentage of body fat, now I burn more calories than I did before so I stay thin.

During this 3 month period when I lost my body fat, I basically stopped eating animal fat. That way the body is forced to burn your body fat. 30% of the calories your body burns for energy comes from fat and it's not particular where it get the fat, but if you eating a lot of processed foods it will get the fat from the food your eating. It will always get the calories it needs from the easiest place. The place where it can get what it needs without using any more energy than it has to.  In other words, we have trained our bodies to take the calories it needs from the food we're eating at the time. Not Good, we have to train our bodies to use stored fat first.

Now about the exercise part, we need to exercise because we don't do enough manual labor any longer. And those of us that do manual labor are mostly doing repetitive work which means we only use or always use the same group of muscles and never really use the other ones.

I wanted to burn my body fat as fast as possible, so I read up on the best ways to burn fat. I found that the exercise program HIIT would burn the most fat. I'm not young anymore and I have knee so most of the exercises didn't work for me. I had to find a low-impact exercise that I could use to do interval training.

So what is interval training? It's really called  "high-speed interval training". It's done by doing an exercise at normal speed for about 1 1/2 minutes, then doing the same exercise, speed up and do the exercise as fast as you can for 45 seconds, then at normal speed again for 1 1/2 minutes, then high-speed again for 45 seconds and so on. Repeat this cycle about 8 to 10 times and you're finished. Do this every other day or Monday, Wednesday, Friday and that all you need.

Sounds easy, right? The trick is to find the right routine that you can do. I needed low-impact so I choice the bike. Because of the weather, I bought a stationary bike and put it in front of a TV in my home office. Those of you with a gym membership can use those bikes. After a couple of months doing this, you'll be ready for a spin class.

If you don't have any joint problems, we might want to try sprinting. You walk at a normal pace for a couple minutes to warm-up. Then you sprint about the length of a football field (100 yards), then you walk quickly back to the start, then sprint the same length again and keep up that routine about 8 or 10 times and then walk for about 10 minutes to cool-down and you're done. You can do the same thing on a stairway at work. You can accomplish the same thing doing squats at home. Read up on interval training exercise on the internet; it's the best way I found to burn body fat quickly.

You can tweet me with questions at #ray0369

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books.

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

Is Being Overweight robbing Your Energy?

Have you ever wondered what happened to your energy? Clients would email me constantly about the lack of energy. I ask them about their diet, what they're eating and how often do they eat, and the most important question, how much extra weight do you have?

You see, you lose energy because you're carrying around too much fat and you probably are not eating the right food to give you energy. So maybe you haven't been exercising but that's not your problem. You have to fix your diet. With the proper diet you will gain some of that energy you lost. Your diet is "key" to a healthy life, but with the availability of manufactured foods and the convenience and price, many people are choosing to take the easiest way and buy manufactured foods that basically has no nutritional value or very little and contain high amounts of white enriched or processed flour, salt and sugar. Those are ingredients that cause you to gain weight.

The body fat that you accumulated over the years need some of your bodies energy to keep your fat alive. Without body fat that energy would be used to burn the fat you eat and is used for body functions. You can't lose all your fat. About 15% of your body mass needs to be fat. It cushions your organs and fat also keeps your bones from rubbing. Your body likes to process the fats it get from seafood and plant food like nuts. You can find out from your doctor how much body fat you have. If you have more than 25% body fat your considered overweight. Almost 67% of adult Americans are overweight. So if you're part of those people don't feel alone, but just because you're part of a large group that doesn't mean your any healthier.

As a young adult, extra body fat probably doesn't bother you, but it will as you age. If you don't like the idea of taking insulin shots every day, you might want to do something about your diet and lose some of that body fat.

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books.

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

Simple Dietary Change You Can Make To Lose Weight

Below are some simple changes you can make to your everyday diet to help you lose weight faster and healthier. This was first blogged on VeryWell.com. It merely demonstrates that losing weight can be easier than you think. It's the little things you do every day, the small decisions like adding a spoon of sugar to coffee or using cream instead of non-fat milk or what you eat for breakfast. It all adds up. It's easy to 1000 calories a day and you don't even realize it.

1

Make Water, Tea And/Or Black Coffee Your Sole Beverages

Benjamin Carpenter/EyeEm/Getty Images

Given that sugar-sweetened beverages have been identified as a leading cause of the obesity epidemic, it makes sense to eliminate those from your diet entirely. And while you’re at it, get rid of the high-calorie, high-end coffee drinks.

And the sports drinks and fruit juices, which are usually just “liquid sugar” by another name. Black coffee and unsweetened tea will be okay if you need your caffeine, as they are very low in calories (and tea and coffee drinking have been shown to have health benefits).

But “water, water everywhere” should become your mantra, and here’s why: water has no calories. Zero. Nada. Compare that to the hundreds of (wasted) calories that you could easily consume drinking sodas and other sugared beverages, and you can see how easily the balance will tilt in your favor.

2

Eliminate White Bread, and Eat Whole Grains in Moderation

Teubner/Getty Images

Whole grains are an important source of dietary fiber and essential nutrients, so look for 100% whole-grain or whole-wheat bread, and limit to two slices per day if you are trying to lose weight.

Research has found that reducing white bread intake is associated with a higher likelihood of losing weight and keeping it off. When it comes to bread, white bread, in particular, is problematic, because it is highly processed and full of refined carbohydrates that the human body quickly turns into sugar (i.e., it has a high glycemic index). Unlike whole-wheat bread, white bread has very little, if any, fiber, and thus is almost devoid of nutritional value.

Think of all the sources of white bread in your diet—sandwich bread and buns, pizza crusts, croutons (which, on top of everything else, are soaked in oil!), biscuits, dinner rolls, and more. And then stop eating them entirely. Switch to a 100% whole wheat source of bread or even go breadless. You’ll be amazed at how much weight you lose this way, and how fast.

3

Eat the Majority of Your Calories Earlier in the Day

Uwe Krejci/Getty Images

There is a famous line by American nutritionist Adelle Davis (1904 – 1974): “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.” In other words, make dinner your lightest meal instead of your heaviest.

And there is a lot of scientific evidence to back this up. Studies have shown that people who eat the majority of their calories earlier in the day tend to lose more weight—and do so faster--than those who save their calories for the evening or night. This may be because eating more food earlier gives you time to burn those calories as you naturally expend energy throughout the day, but other studies have shown changes in levels of the appetite hormones, leptin, and ghrelin, that also play a role.

You can tweet me with questions at #ray0369

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books. 

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

Do Men Lose Weight Faster Than Women?

The Rumor: Men lose weight more quickly than women

Many people believe that when it comes to weight loss, men have an advantage. Anecdotal stories of ladies sweating and struggling to lose a pound or two compare to tales of men cutting back on the junk, hitting the gym and watching the weight drop off. But what's the real truth?

The Verdict: Men do lose weight faster than women, at least at first

Men tend to have more lean muscle tissue, which burns more calories than body fat, even during rest. And when men and women cut the same number of calories, men usually do lose more weight -- but it’s short-term. “Over the long-term, the playing field is more equal,” says dietician David Grotto, RDN, self-proclaimed “guyatician” and author of The Best Things You Can Eat. “It’s not a race to see who can lose weight the fastest. The important thing is that you’re both going in the same direction.”

Comments from the author

This is a good read. Women get discouraged easily because it seems like they can't make any progress, but in fact, the first few months they are training their body to lose fat and it's not easy because a woman should have more fat. But that doesn't do any good knowing that when you look in the mirror.

Weight-loss programs often accentuate the difference. When sedentary men and women both start exercise programs, men tend to lose body fat, while many women don’t. In one study out of England, men and women were each put on commercial weight-loss programs such as Atkins, Slim-Fast and Weight Watchers. Two months in, the men had lost twice as much weight as the women -- and three times as much body fat. But by six months, the rate of weight loss had evened out between the genders.

If you’re a guy, you can thank the testosterone you have -- and the extra estrogen you don’t -- for your weight-loss edge. On average, women have between six and 11 percent more body fat than men, an assumed evolutionary adaptation to help during pregnancy. From puberty to menopause, women maintain more average body fat than men -- even when they take in fewer calories.

But it's important to remember that "fat" doesn't mean "unhealthy." Yes, women have larger fat stores, but it's part of their physiology, meaning it's not extra weight. So if a woman has 11 percent more body fat than a man, it doesn't mean she's 11 percent "fatter." A perfectly fit woman will still hold six to 11 percent more body fat than a perfectly fit man.

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books.

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not 

case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

How Alcohol Hurts Your Waistline

If you've been trying to lose weight for any length of time, you're probably pretty good at monitoring your calories. Even if you don't keep a detailed food journal, you probably have a rough idea of the calories you're eating.

But there's one area we often fall short and that's in the calories we drink. Energy drinks, juice and smoothies can add extra calories, but alcohol is often our biggest enemy, going down so smoothly, we may have no idea just how many extra calories we're taking in.

If cocktails are a regular part of your diet and you're trying to lose weight, being more aware of what and how much you drink can make a difference.

Drinking, Weight Loss, and Your Health

If you're a moderate drinker, which is defined as two drinks a day for men or one drink a day for women, some studies have found possible health benefits such as:

• Reduced risk of developing heart disease
• Reduced risk of ischemic stroke
• Lower risk of dying of a heart attack
• Lower risk of developing diabetes

Of course, there are other ways to achieve all of these things without tipping a glass - exercise, for one, and lifestyle changes like quitting smoking and eating a healthy diet. While there may be some health benefits to moderate drinking and, of course, many of us just like it, there are some drawbacks as well, starting with your waistline.

I reblogged this post from WebMD, but I have a few observations I want to add. I'm of German decent and I like beer and red wine and I do have one drink a day or maybe two but I'm maintaining, not trying to lose weight.  I found, over a period of several years, that when I was trying to lose weight alcohol would keep me from losing and I don't think it was because of the calories. Alcohol will slow down your metabolism and keep you from burning calories. So does one glass of beer or wine really hurt you? That's a question you have to answer for yourself. All you can do is try one drink maybe every other day for ten days and see if it stops your weight loss. I believe substituting calories never works either. A coke and a beer will have about the same calories, right. But can I change my coke a day habit for a beer a day habit? That's where I believe that all calories are not the same so you can eat 2000 calories a day of healthy foods, like fresh foods (those are foods that have no label) or 2000 calories of manufactured foods (foods you buy in packages, cans, or bottles). 2000 calories of fresh foods will keep you healthy and 2000 calories of manufactured food will keep you in the doctor's office with problems like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, weight problems and even malnutrition.

Food companies are quick to blame you for your health problems, they say you over-indulge, you eat too much sugar, or you should exercise more. They don't want to say anything about the food they make. But when the sales of that food item start to go down, they are quick to drop the item or change the item, but as long as they can sell that item and make money, no matter how unhealthy it is, you will still find it on the shelf.

How Alcohol Can Pack on the Pounds

 Added Calories

One of the obvious side effects of alcohol is that it adds calories to your diet. But so does a soft drink. What the point? A couple of alcoholic drinks will increase your appetite and because alcohol will impair your judgment, you will make bad food choices that add even more calories. A night out once a week with your friends can easily add 5000 calories to your day's consumption. If you were dieting all week and working out every day that extra 5000 calories turned a 2-pound loss into a 2-pound gain that will take you 2 weeks to undo. But if your going out every Friday night with your friends all the dieting and workout may be for nothing. You don't have to quit going out, but you have to quit drinking alcohol, change to Club Soda w/twist and maybe you can do the driving.

While many of us have a handle on the calories we eat, we often don't know how many calories are in our drinks.This statement is the truth. Many overweight people consume more calories in their drink than in their food but don't keep track of their drinks.

While alcohol doesn't contain fat, it does contain 7 calories per gram. That's more than protein and carbs, both of which contain 4 calories per gram. To get an idea of what you're drinking, check out this brief list of common cocktails.

Does your favorite drink have more calories than you thought?

• 1 can (12 oz) Beer - 135-145 calories
• 1 can (12 oz) Light Beer - 101 calories
• 1 glass (3.5 oz) Red or White Wine - 70-75 calories
• 1 shot (1.5 oz) Gin, rum, vodka or whiskey - 97 calories
• 1 glass (6 oz) Cosmopolitan - 143 calories
• 1 glass (4.5 oz) Pina colada - 262 calories
• 1 glass (2.2 oz) Martini - 135 calorie

These drinks don't have that many calories, but some mixed drinks will contain more than 500 calories. If it tastes too good then it's probably loaded with calories.

A couple of beers can easily add more than 300 calories to your diet, the equivalent of 30 minutes of jogging for a 150-lb person. Having a few drinks after a workout may end up undoing all that hard work. Find more information about your favorite drinks at Calorie Counter.com. An experienced person who works out regularly will only burn about 300 calories in a one hour workout period.

 Increased Appetite

Some studies suggest that alcohol can actually stimulate the appetite, at least in the short term. This is especially true when you're at a party or some other social event where tempting foods are everywhere you turn. It's hard enough to avoid fatty or sugary foods when you're sober, but add alcohol and an increased appetite and it may become impossible.

 License to Indulge

Not only does alcohol add calories, it makes it harder to stick to a healthy diet. It takes a high dose of willpower to turn down high-calorie foods and that requires energy. But there is another reason to be careful consuming alcohol. Alcohol will stop the body from burning calories. I'll explain, once you become activity in the morning your put your fat-burning furnace in over-drive. And by staying active during the day you keep burning fat as long as you feed your body the nutrition it takes to keep burning fat. So to burn body fat I have to go on a low-fat diet and it worked for me. If I consumed little fat, my body had to burn body fat to create energy and that worked for my as long as I didn't drink alcohol. When I would drink alcohol my liver would stop burning the fat and turned to processing alcohol.

The liver has more than 100 functions and the most important is to filter anything that's going into the blood. Alcohol will go straight into the blood if the liver doesn't stop it. So, the liver has to drop whatever it's processing, which is generally fat from food, and tackle the alcohol because it will go through your system much faster than anything else. Now any of the food you consume with or after the alcohol will not be processed and will probably be stored in fat cells.

Adding alcohol to the mix drains that energy even more, leaving you less concerned about blowing your diet than satisfying your cravings. After a few drinks, that healthy diet you've been following so diligently suddenly doesn't seem all that important anymore.

The Day After

A night of drinking, even if it's just one too many, not only leaves you vulnerable to temptation, it may leave you too tired or hungover to exercise the next day.

When you're hungover, you're dehydrated, clumsy and nauseous - all things that preclude a workout.

Like everything else, moderation is the key when it comes to enjoying alcohol while watching your weight. Treat alcohol the same way you treat other things in your diet - as something you can enjoy from time to time without going overboard. Learn more about safe drinking to ensure that you're keeping your body healthy and safe.

You can tweet me with questions at #ray0369

I write several blogs and e-books, check out some of my other sites.

gettingtoahealthyweight.blog
idropped40pounds.wordpress.com
howbaddoyouwanttoloseweight.blogspot.com
blogonweight.blogspot.com

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books.

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page. I’ll give you a discount coupon you can use at checkout. (PJ42H) not case-sensitive the price is $1.99 w/coupon

Fruits Have a Rightful Place in Your Diet

Eliminating fruit from your diet is not only unnecessary—it’s unwise

By David L. Katz, MD, Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com. 

There should be no need for me, a public health physician, to tell you that fruit—real, whole fruit in its native state—is good for you, because there's a good chance your parents already did that long ago. And their parents likely did the same.

Unfortunately, we are so good at propagating pseudo-confusion about diet and health that we have even managed to get nutty about fruit. (Nuts, by the way, are fruit, and they are good for you too—but that can be a topic for another day.) My most respected colleagues and I routinely lament the enormous opportunity cost of needing to re-establish—again and again—what we have long known about nutrition, rather than devoting our energies to learning what we don’t yet know, and perhaps more importantly still, putting what we do know to good use.

The Twisted Tale of Fruit and the Glycemic Index

Public understanding of the health effects of routine fruit consumption has fallen into just such a Groundhog Day quagmire for two reasons. First, beginning in the late 1990s, and extending into the early 2000s, right around the peak of interest in the Atkins’ diet, popular attention to the glycemic index exploded. While the index itself, and the related glycemic load, are very valuable measures in science, their use as a standalone indicator of nutrition quality was very misguided and symptomatic of our perennial inclination to seek out silver bullets and scapegoats. In case you are wondering, this is not just my assessment; the inventor of the glycemic index is a colleague and close friend, and he agrees.

In any event, preoccupation with the glycemic index as the one dietary truth to rule them all precipitated a spate of fad diet books based entirely on the metric, perhaps most famously The GI Diet.

In all such diets, fruit was banished from the diet, at least during the phases of promised rapid weight loss, because of its relatively high glycemic index. The banishment of fruit in the service of weight loss or the prevention of type 2 diabetes was always both silly and wrong, but fad diet authors are expert at making the silly sound scientific—and the books sold like low-glycemic hotcakes. Remember one thing if nothing else, "all calories are not created equal". The calories in ice cream are not the same as the calories in an apple and if you have equal amounts of calories of each, your body will use the calories from the apple but won't use the calories from the ice cream, they will be stored in fat cells. 

Comparing Apples and Oranges

We had only recently recovered from the GI boondoggle when the vilification of fructose captured the public’s imagination, nearly ten years ago. The focus on the harms of excess fructose was born of legitimacy. High-fructose corn syrup had diffused throughout the food supply as an alternative to sucrose (derived from sugar cane or beets) because of its low cost to manufacturers and its capacity, shared with most if not all sweeteners, to stimulate appetite.

There were, however, three problems with a fixation on fructose, and the on-going inclination to blame all dietary ills on sugar is symptomatic of them. The first was hyperbole: While an excess of added sugar (any sugar) is harmful to us, the contention that sugar in general and fructose specifically were “toxic” or “poison,” without consideration of dose, was wrong and misleading. Second, the conflation of high-fructose corn syrup for fructose was equally misleading. Like sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup is a mix of both fructose and glucose; the two sugars are more alike than different in both composition and health effects.

The third problem is our topic today. Long before it was known as a component of high-fructose corn syrup, fructose was known widely as “fruit sugar.” Fructose is, in fact, the principal or even only sugar in most whole fruits.

The problem here is obvious and predictable.  If fructose were toxic, and fruits were delivery vehicles for it, then eating fruit must be bad for us. The scientists impugning fructose didn’t necessarily mean to indict fruit by association, but they did.

But if eating fruit was in any way bad for us, it would be bad for us in the ways that excess sugar (fructose or other) is bad for us, and the ways that high-glycemic processed foods are bad for us, namely increased risk of weight gain, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes.

The truth is that routine intake of whole fruit has long been associated with exactly the opposite effects.

Whole fruit has long figured in dietary patterns associated with weight loss and weight control, as well as good health across the life span. Fruit has been shown to protect against diabetes.

The evidence that eating whole fruit not only is innocent of the transgressions of added sugar, but directly defends against them has long been strong. It recently became even stronger, fortified with the results of a multi-year study of roughly a half million Chinese adults, published in PLOS Medicine. Routine intake of fruit among those without diabetes at baseline was associated with a highly significant reduction in the risk of diabetes developing. Routine fruit consumption among those with diabetes was associated with a comparably significant reduction in the risk of complications or premature death.

Consider the Whole Package

There is a lot more to whole fruit than fructose. Along with a wide array of beneficial nutrients, most fruits are concentrated sources of fiber. Fiber is filling, effectively calorie-free, and can even help stabilize blood sugar and insulin levels. Because fruit juice eliminates fiber and pulp, tends not to be filling, and accelerates the delivery of fructose, it does not share the credits of its parent, and intake should generally be limited.

Whole fruit is a mainstay in the best diets for longevity and lifelong vitality. Routine fruit intake defends against obesity and diabetes alike. The truth about fruit is a reminder that scapegoating any given nutrient or property can obscure the health effects of a whole food that is more than the sum of such preoccupations. The active ingredient in blueberries, in other words, is blueberries.

Your parents were right: Fruit really is good for you.  We really ought to accept that once and for all and move on.

You can tweet me with questions at #ray0369

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