Hi Weight Loss Seekers
These words are framed on the wall of Doctor Westerman a leading clinician in the United States. These same words are bound to spark controversy, denial and derision.
The problem is that most people who will criticize these words have no understanding of why they hang on his wall.
Some will say that he claims that one banana will make them fat. Of course it won’t just as one burger from a junk food chain won’t make you fat. But regular consumption over time will.
The bad part of this story is that we all know the burger is bad for us, but we have been told for decades that fruit is a necessary part of a healthy diet, which will keep us from putting on weight.
We all know how successful the low fat advise has been over the past 50 years, it was worse than useless, it was disastrous.
I know people in their seventies who grew up in Europe who received an orange for Christmas. Back then fruit was expensive and not freely available. But modern growing methods plus advanced storage and transportation means that most of us can access all kinds of fruit all year around.
Even worse than the amount of fruit available are the big fruit juices, which pass for healthy drinks.
So why does fruit make us fat? Fruit contains vitamins and minerals and some fibre, which is good but it also contains fructose, which we call fruit sugar. Fructose is converted in the liver to glucose.
Some glucose is used as energy and most is converted to large chain tri-glycerides, also know as fat! These large molecules are stored in your fat cells, and this is why fruit makes you fat.
A second reason is that fructose causes the hormone leptin to become less effective and leads to leptin resistance, in short you lose the ability to know when you have had enough to eat and so you overeat and put on weight.
There is some room for fruit in a healthy diet, berries are the best. The less sweet the fruit is the less fructose it contains. An occasional orange or apple is no problem, but not the old 2 pieces a day and certainly not fruit juices.
The habit of giving fruit juice to small children is making them fat and potentially setting them up for type 2 diabetes.
In short fruit will make you fat, it will cause you pain and it is certainly not the health food you were lead to believe it was.
Wishing you Vibrant Health
Ian Newton