Will Fruit Make Me Fat??

If there was a short answer, it would be no.... but there isn't...so keep reading.

But the fructose issue is complicated.  The Rogue Nutritionist, Jonny Bowden, warns against fruit consumption if you are trying to lose 15 pounds or more.  Other nutrition legends are on the same page.  Here is a visual aid to help you decide whether or not you should gulp down that fruit smoothie...

Consider this comparison...

Imagine a FedEx shipping plant with a huge fleet of trucks and piles and piles of boxes to be shipped.  How quickly can you ship the packages?  The number of workers packing the trucks would be your rate-limiting step.  The boxes can only be delivered as quickly as the trucks are filled.  It doesn’t matter how large a fleet you have to deliver boxes with, without workers to pack them, the packages can only drip-drip-drip out of the plant.  In digestion, the rate of sugar (glucose) metabolism is bottlenecked by the regulatory enzyme phosphofructokinase.  This is intimately tied to the release of insulin when glucose enters the blood and the resulting rise in leptin, which down-regulates the appetite.  Fructose, that lucky dog, gets to skip that step.  Instead of being shuttled out of the blood via the insulin pathway, fructose directly enters the liver and gets metabolized without that rate-limiting step.  So if you consume a lot of excess fructose, your liver synthesizes a lot of triglycerides (fat) from it.  In fact, there’s practically no limit since insulin isn’t involved and your appetite won’t be blunted. So what happens?  Fatty deposits begin to show up in the liver (undelivered “packages” sitting around in the plant warehouse) – and over time, inflammation and liver cell damage occurs.  

Eat a bunch of fresh fruit, and you’re likely to consume 15-20 grams of fructose, tops.  But with the  industrialization of food and the addition of high fructose corn syrup as the primary sweetener used in food manufacturing, daily intake of fructose is nearly 4 times higher than it was a short time ago.  In addition, sweeteners like agave nectar have been touted as "healthy" alternatives to sugar contain up to 90% fructose.  Unregulated consumption will start to add up over time very quickly!  I know it is long, but trust me, the video below is worth your time.  It has over 3 million views!