Dr. Doug Grahm represents the “Natural Hygiene” wing of the health food movement, advocating fruits for “power” health (www.FoodnSport.com): “Fruits and vegetables are health food. The rest are condiments. Anyone who has ever experienced a craving for something sweet at the end of a meal is getting a message from their body to eat more fruit. The optimum foods for us, nutritionally, are those foods whose nutrient content most closely mimic our nutrient needs. In every category of nutrition, fruits come closest to meeting those needs. Many nutrients do not become fully available in fruit until it undergoes the final stages of ripening.”
On the other hand, Hippocrates Health Institute maintains that too much fruit can misdirect neuronal impulses, temporarily leading to crossed circuits in the brain. Perhaps a balanced middle ground would be eating 3 to 6 pieces of fruit daily.
Hypoglycemics react to any fruit on an empty stomach in the first few minutes. (Please see “Helping hypoglycemia and diabetes”.) A high fruit and especially a high refined sugar or refined wheat diet increases the amount of insulin produced, stressing the pancreas. I do limit consumption to 1 or 2 fruits at a sitting, and 4 or 5 maximum in a day.
Sucrose (table sugar) found in many breakfast cereals and snack foods causes a sharp adrenaline surge that makes people, especially children, start bouncing off the walls. During the first few minutes after eating a bite of fruit or any food containing sugars, a fraction of the sugars gets absorbed directly into the blood through the tissues of the mouth and throat, the same as with an alcoholic drink.
The fibers in fruit slow absorption more than the free sugar added to cereals. The sucrose in fruit causes only a brief adrenaline rush. The glucose increases the supply in the blood (especially important for the brain), unless one is susceptible to a hypoglycemic reaction. Fruits could well prove more enticing, milder and longer lasting than unhealthy sucrose-laden prepared foods and soft drinks, for children as well as adults.
In an unripe banana the carbohydrates are mostly starches. During the process of ripening the starches get converted to sugars; a fully ripe banana has only 1-2% starch. Bananas contain a higher percentage of fructose and glucose than sucrose, as do other fruits such as apples and pears.
Bananas offer no particular advantage over other fruits in the content of total dietary fiber (soluble plus insoluble). However bananas contain more than three times the level of sugar that is in a form that does not get digested (the polysaccharide pectin) until beneficial probiotic bacteria in the colon feast on a portion of it. Before passing through the digestive tract and helping to form comfortable stools, pectin loosely encases sugars so that they take longer to reach the walls of the digestive tract, slowing sugar uptake. Pectin also gives bananas that beloved creamy texture.
Bananas are hypoallergenic. They also provide vitamins, including B6, one of the nutrients needed to make the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin has been shown to reduce pain, depress appetite and facilitate a sense of calm. They are rich in potassium, important for keeping pH up (more alkaline), for hormone secretion as well as a multitude of other bodily functions. (Please see “Acid-alkali balance”.)
For North Americans, bananas require lengthy transport using fossil fuels. For this reason as well as the need to eat a variety of foods to get a balanced range of nutrients, one might consider limiting the number of bananas, eating a variety of fruits locally grown.
Alternating bites of fruit with cucumber, leafy greens, celery, or broccoli florets clears the palate to maximize the sweetness of the next bite.
Beware storing fruits or fruits mixed with vegetables in a closed or large container. “One rotten apple spoils the barrel” because of the plant ripening hormone ethylene that one smells coming from ripe fruit. Ethylene is produced during ripening, increasing rapidly during rotting. Ethylene influences other fruits to greatly accelerate ripening. Only one part internal ethylene per million irreversibly initiates ripening, causing ever more ethylene to get produced in an auto-catalytic feedback loop. If ethylene is applied externally, at first more ripening occurs just under the skin. Unless temperature, humidity, and concentration of ethylene are controlled very carefully, risk of rotting under the skin greatly increases. Ethylene production increases within bruises, so that they ripen ahead of the rest of the fruit, increasing the chance of rot in the bruise while the rest ripens. Vegetablesstored with fruits in the same container are vulnerable to damage.
At refrigeration temperatures, all of these effects get slowed down or stopped (www.catalyticgenerators.com/whatisethylene.html). Refrigeration in fact derails the ripening process, so that unripe fruits that have been refrigerated ripen very unevenly after being returned to room temperature.
This trickiness of the application of ethylene externally may be another reason for the failure in the marketplace of tomatoes genetically modified not to be able to make ethylene as every other veggie and fruit naturally does upon ripening. When it came time to ripen them via external ethylene generated by machine, the warehouses would’ve unknowingly made mistakes very easily, possibly shipping tomatoes that were beginning to rot just under the skin, making them taste bitter.
Regarding fruit consumption, please also see “Appendices: Food Combining” and “Helping hypoglycemia and diabetes”.
