What If You Only Eat Fruit For 30 Days?

Hello Health Champions. What if you ate  only fruit for 30 days? Nothing but fruit.  

It could be the healthiest fruit straight off  the tree. It could be fruit from the store  

or from a can or from a juice bottle  and while there are some differences,  

it's not as much difference as people  like to think. We've heard the phrase  

fruits and vegetables eat more fruits and  vegetables at least five a day of fruits  

and vegetables. We've heard that so much that we  think they go together that it doesn't matter if  

it's fruits or vegetables and as long as  we eat more of it we will get healthier.  

But I'd like to remind us of this mark twain quote  what gets us in trouble is not what we don't know  

it's what we know for sure that just ain't so. And  every time in a video that I even mention fruit I  

have people comment and said you made good sense  until you talked about fruit because it's like  

this sacred cow it's like this holy grail that  we're not allowed to criticize or question in any  

way. So let's compare fruits and vegetables and  see how they are like and how they're different  

so first of all they're both very very low in fat.  They're virtually fat free. Insignificant. They're  

also very low in protein even though there's  some protein in there they're both still very low  

oftentimes we talk about fiber and there is a  little bit more there's a few percent fiber in  

both fruits and vegetables. So far they're looking  very much the same but when we get to sugar and we  

compare fruits to vegetables, we find that fruit  has about five times more. About 10 percent sugar  

on average whereas vegetables have about two  percent. And I know that there's a biological  

classification and I don't really care  about that in this video we're talking about  

fruit being plants that taste sweet that people  usually refer to as fruit and vegetables as what  

people refer to as vegetables because they don't  taste sweet. I know that there's a biological  

overlap but we're not talking about that in this  video. If you were to eat only fruit that was your  

entire diet and there are people who do this and  they do this for years or even decades and they  

write books about it and they say that this should  be the healthiest way to eat and you should do  

it too if you were to eat only fruit then  you would be getting about 85 percent  

of your calories from sugar and on average fruit  has about 50 calories per 100 grams so if you're  

to eat all of your food in the form of fruit  and you get 2 000 calories that means you need  

to eat about 4 kilograms per day or about a little  over eight pounds of fruit then there's something  

called macros and that's how many percent of your  calories come from carbohydrate fat and protein  

and we want to keep in mind that the body  has two sources of fuel the it derives energy  

from carbohydrates and fat whichever one you eat  more of the body will use it can use these almost  

interchangeably and then protein is primarily  intended for building blocks let's first look at  

standard american diet sad and there  we are recommended to eat about 55  

of our calories from carbohydrates somewhere  around 25 from fat and about 20 from protein  

so these are usually ranges and i just kind of  pick the midpoint of the range to get a simple  

number to work with and there are many  reasons why this is the recommendation  

and it's not that a healthy person couldn't  stay healthy on this if they avoided sugar  

and they ate whole food and so forth but the  problem is that the world as a whole has eaten  

much too much sugar for several decades and  because of that we have destroyed our metabolic  

health and now we can't tolerate this much  carbohydrate and therefore there's a lot of talk  

about something called low carb high fat lchf and  that's what i generally promote and it's not that  

everyone has to eat that but it is the solution  for most people when people have destroyed  

their metabolism with a bunch of sugar  they have fatty livers they're overweight  

their blood sugar is high they're insulin  resistant now it's not enough to just eat  

what you could have eaten to maintain even if you  eat good food for most people that's not enough  

and instead we need to cut back the carbohydrates  and the sugar dramatically so basically all we're  

doing is we're flip flopping instead of getting  most of our calories from carbohydrate we get  

most of our calories from fat and we're still  getting about 20 percent of our calories from  

protein for building blocks so like we said you  can get your fuel from carbs or fat and in both  

of these scenarios we're getting about 80 percent  of our calories of our fuel from carbs and fat the  

difference of course being that fat is a more  stable fuel it doesn't trigger insulin it is  

metabolized much slower it doesn't affect blood  sugar and it doesn't destroy our metabolic health  

but now let's compare that to fruit if we eat  all of our food as fruit now we're getting 86  

of our energy from carbohydrates and not only  that but it's all sugar it's not just carbohydrate  

it's a mixture of fructose and glucose which we're  going to talk about we're getting very very little  

fat and we're getting very little protein  so overall we'll be getting about 40 grams  

of protein which doesn't look like a whole lot  which it isn't but it's actually worse than  

that because these proteins are plant-based and  they're not as effectively utilized by the body  

so this is not the same as getting 40 grams of  protein from an animal source we're getting about  

16 grams of fat which means we're also going to  have trouble getting our essential fatty acids in  

and most importantly we're getting 400 grams of  sugar so virtually all the carbohydrate is going  

to be in the form of sugar but a lot of people say  that's okay because this sugar is natural it comes  

with vitamins and minerals and fiber and it's a  natural sugar it's different than the other sugar  

you eat so calorie for calorie though vegetables  typically have more vitamins and more minerals  

than fruit and as far as the fiber buffering  or slowing down the sugar it will slow down the  

absorption a tiny tiny little bit but in the end  every molecule of that sugar has to be processed  

so while it flattens the blood sugar curve a  little bit the more fiber you have in the end  

it makes no difference because the sugar load is  exactly the same and here's probably the biggest  

misconception of all that fruit should contain  natural sugar that this would be somehow different  

than added sugar and even on the food labels they  have to add added sugar they have to list that  

separately whereas food that has sugar naturally  containing we don't have to call it added sugar as  

if it was different but the truth of the matter  is that there is fructose and there is glucose  

and the formula is exactly the same c6 h12 o6  there are 6 carbons 12 hydrogens and 6 oxygens  

and that's exactly what we get in fructose it's  exactly what we get in glucose and if we link the  

two together now we have table sugar white sugar  the crystals that you have in that bag that they  

call added sugar but it's the same thing and it  doesn't matter if we call it agave or honey or  

brown rice syrup or molasses or demeraro or any of  those different names it's still exactly the same  

it's c6h12o6 in different forms and in fruit we  have slightly different ratios of these but in the  

end in fruit we have some of the sugar occurring  as fructose some of it as glucose and some of it  

as sucrose and when we add it all up if we eat all  of our calories from fruit we're going to end up  

eating 400 grams of sugar per day and it's going  to be almost exactly 200 grams of glucose and 200  

grams of fructose one of the characteristics  of fruit is that it's a low density food  

like we said it has about 10 percent sugar has  a little bit of protein trace amount of fat some  

fiber but other than that it's all water and that  means there's only about 50 calories per 100 grams  

so you're going to be hungry you're going to eat  some fruit and it doesn't take long before you're  

hungry again so you'll find that you have to eat  pretty much constantly which makes sense because  

if you have to eat 4 kilograms or over 8 pounds  a day then you're gonna have to eat pretty much  

constantly now back in the 80s there was a book  called eat to win and it was written by someone  

who was supposedly also a nutrition counselor for  some tennis players who were some of the best in  

the world at that time ivan lendl and martina  navratilova part of that was not just to eat  

all fruit but they were supposed to eat only  fruit up through lunch time if there was ever  

a crazy thing out there then i have probably tried  it because i was always curious i read these books  

i wanted to figure out how it worked and how would  you know unless you tried it yourself and what i  

found is i have never been so hungry in my life i  would bring fruit and i would sit and i would eat  

it constantly for the first part of the day and  i was ravenously hungry another popular trend was  

juice cleanses and there was a movie called fat  sick and nearly dead that promoted the idea of  

doing a 10 day or a 20 day or 30 day juice cleanse  so of course i tried that as well and again  

i was hungrier than ever i didn't feel so bad but  i had to eat constantly and if we look at fruit  

then compare it to soda or coca-cola we see that  there is very very little difference that there's  

a little bit of fat protein and slight amount of  fiber but for the most part we're basically just  

drinking sugar water eating fruit or drinking  juice is very very similar to just drinking  

soda all day long and outside my house we feed  the hummingbirds because they're really really  

adorable eating fruit and drinking sugar water is  kind of like eating like a hummingbird so you get  

hungry you get some sugar you feel really really  satisfied and this is the curious part when i did  

that juice cleanse that i would alternate between  hunger and satisfaction hunger and satisfaction  

every few minutes throughout the day but  when you got a little bit of sugar you felt  

remarkably satisfied for a short period of  time and then only a few minutes later you were  

ravenously hungry again now let's look a little  closer at the glucose and the fructose we have  

400 grams of sugar 200 grams of glucose so the  first thing that's going to happen is we get a  

blood sugar roller coaster instead of like we eat  three times or six times per day we get six spikes  

now we get blood sugar spikes and hypoglycemia  all day long and a healthy blood sugar  

is basically around 100 milligrams per deciliter  maybe 80 when we're fasting and 100 or a little  

higher when we're eating and what we want to keep  in mind is 100 milligrams per deciliter is about  

three maybe four grams of blood sugar depending on  the size of the person so if we maintain the blood  

sugar here at around 100 milligrams we have just  over half a teaspoon of sugar in the bloodstream  

at any given time so in the good range we'll have  three or four on the low end hypoglycemic we'll  

have two grams when it's too high we have about  five grams so it's not fluctuating a whole lot  

even though the blood sugar goes crazy we're  only talking about one gram up or down in the  

bloodstream at any given time and that has to  be compared with putting in 200 grams of glucose  

per day so if you compare this tiny tiny little  yellow line down here is how much you have at any  

given time and 200 is how much you're adding  through your diet how much you're ingesting  

throughout the course of a day and if the body  only needs one gram up or down and we load in  

200 then that's a huge stress on the body the body  has to work overtime in trying to get rid of that  

so the body can use one or two or three grams at a  time for usage that's what it uses for energy for  

the brain and the muscles and the organs and so  forth it's also going to fill up the carbohydrate  

stores the glycogen as much as it can but that's  rather limited it can't store a whole lot of  

carbohydrate so the only other thing it can do  is to turn all this glucose into fat also known  

as triglycerides so when it's in the bloodstream  we usually call it triglycerides that's the blood  

fats when we store it in the body we call it  body fat but it's still basically triglycerides  

and what you'll probably find on an all fruit diet  is your triglycerides most likely will skyrocket  

and i remember when dr mercola did a similar  diet and he said that it was supposed to be so  

healthy but when he checked his triglycerides  they were over 400 and they're supposed to be  

under a hundred ideally probably somewhere around  75 and his went over 400 just from eating fruit  

and fruit of course is virtually fat free but it  doesn't matter it's not what you eat it's what the  

body does with it and if you overload on sugar the  body has no choice but to turn it into fat what  

about historically hasn't fruit always been around  yes it has but let's look at how it's a little  

different so the mechanism eat fruit raise  blood sugar turn it into fat get hungry  

so you can eat more we mentioned that mechanism  and that hasn't changed what is different though  

is historically everything was organic we  never had pesticides or man-made fertilizers  

or chemicals in making the fruit extra juicy and  plump and sugary it was all based on the land  

the second thing was that it was all local  when i grew up in sweden we had apples  

pears plums and cherries and that was pretty much  it we didn't have oranges we didn't have bananas  

we didn't have pineapple or mango or any of those  tropical fruits but now with global trade we have  

every fruit from every part of the world available  everywhere the other thing that's different  

was seasonal that this system was in place for us  to be able to get fat when there was plenty so we  

could survive the times when there wasn't so much  so we always had some aspect of feast and famine  

there were times when we could eat more when the  land provided more and that's when we feasted  

so we can put on fat and survive the  famine so in that historical scenario  

fruit serves a purpose for survival but when we  change the rules in the modern world now this  

doesn't serve that same purpose anymore and if we  have too much all the time it becomes a problem  

so out of all that sugar in fruit half is glucose  which we talked about and half is fructose so if  

we eat only fruit we're going to get about 200  grams of fructose per day as well and fructose  

causes problems at a whole different level than  glucose does you're probably familiar with high  

fructose corn syrup it is what it's a synthetic  product used in soda and in a 12 ounce or about  

three and a half deciliters of soda or coca-cola  we get about 16 grams of fructose so there's  

about 30 grams total of sugar but 16 of that is  fructose because it's a little more than half in  

high fructose corn syrup so 200 grams of fructose  from fruit is like having 12 coca-colas every day  

in terms of metabolic damage it is exactly the  same and what it does it causes liver overload  

because the glucose it is spread out evenly over  all the cells in the body but the fructose can  

only be processed through the liver so all of this  substrate has to be processed through the liver  

only this causes something called non-alcoholic  fatty liver disease so this is like drinking a lot  

of alcohol in terms of the burden on the liver  it's like you have many many alcoholic drinks  

every day even though a lot of the glucose gets  turned into triglycerides fructose gets turned  

into triglycerides and fat even more and this is  where the fatty liver comes from and while glucose  

has an impact on metabolic disease fructose is  the key it is by far much worse in causing insulin  

resistance and type 2 diabetes and here's some  other problems that often happen to people who eat  

nothing but fruit they tend to have low levels of  vitamin b12 low levels of calcium iodine and iron  

which of course is very critical calcium for bone  but also for signaling and muscle contraction  

and so forth iodine is critical for metabolism for  the thyroid and iron of course has to do with red  

blood cells and the distribution of oxygen also  vitamin d levels tend to be lower and they tend  

to be deficient in fatty acids essential fatty  acids like omega-3 fatty acids and also because  

they're very low in protein and the protein is not  utilized as effectively they tend to have protein  

deficiencies as a result very commonly you'll find  anemia fatigue immune dysfunction and osteoporosis  

in these people some of you may remember a few  years back when ashton kutcher was playing steve  

jobs the founder of apple in a movie called  jobs in 2013 and steve jobs who later died of  

pancreatic cancer he was a fruitarian at least  off and on because he had read some things  

about fruit having healing properties and high  energy foods and so forth but what happened to  

ashton was he ended up in the hospital because of  eating only fruit and he had severe pancreatitis  

and the pancreas of course is involved with  regulating blood sugar it makes digestive enzymes  

and it makes insulin to regulate blood sugar  and some people even said that steve jobs  

might have died from pancreatic cancer because of  eating all that fruit now i don't think there's  

any foundation for that statement but on the other  hand being a fruitarian certainly didn't save his  

pancreas either but then what about all the books  written about being a fruitarian what about people  

who claim that they solved all of their health  problems that they have been eating nothing but  

fruit for 10 20 30 years and apparently they're  rather healthy so what we have to keep in mind is  

everyone is very very different and there's  a difference in age there's a difference  

in metabolic health in liver health inactivity  level there's a difference in duration some people  

might do really well eating only fruit for a day  or a week or a couple of weeks and other people  

can get away with it for years but some people  would perish doing that and we also have to keep  

in mind that there is a enormous difference in  our genetic carb tolerance some people can eat  

fruit they can eat glucose they can eat sugar for  decades and never develop any metabolic problems  

whereas other people have a predisposition for  type 2 diabetes so as soon as they start eating  

a little bit higher carb of any kind they turn  into diabetics so we have to keep in mind when we  

hear about these stories when we read these books  that they're a very very limited section of the  

population there may be a fraction of a percentage  that have tried this and if it's great for them  

great let them do that but it does not mean  that it is the best solution for the population  

as a whole i even know of people who have lived  a very long time on basically cigarettes coffee  

and coca-cola and 10 20 30 years and they're slim  and they look healthy does that mean that this is  

a good human diet that if someone wrote a book  on the benefits of this that you should try that  

obviously not just because a small percentage  of people can survive despite doing that  

does not mean that it is a healthy lifestyle  that's why we need to understand the principles  

the metabolic mechanisms so that we can  understand how is it going to work for us and  

how is it going to work for most people and when  is it not going to work what are the exceptions  

that might be different and here is the  million dollar question is fruit good or bad  

well that's the wrong question isn't it  based on everything that we've talked about  

it is not good or bad it's about how much and  for whom so it depends on where you are on the  

metabolic spectrum if you have type 2 diabetes if  you have a metabolic problem if you have destroyed  

your carbohydrate and your sugar handling capacity  then you need to cut way way back on carbohydrates  

and sugar and the strictest version of low carb is  called keto where you need to be under 30 or under  

20 or even under 10 grams of net carbs per day but  even then a lot of people can have some fruit but  

i would suggest you have blackberries strawberries  and raspberries because they have less than 5  

grams of sugar less than 5 grams of net carbs  so depending on how strict you need to be  

some people probably need to be less than 5 grams  some people less than 10 grams of carbs from fruit  

that would still let you eat maybe 200 grams  of berries or if you're a little stricter maybe  

10 grams so it's not that you have to eliminate  it completely you just have to stay within your  

budget so to speak but some people don't have  to be that strict so if you are fit and you're  

in maintenance meaning you've either reversed a  metabolic condition or you never had a metabolic  

condition in the first place and you're reasonably  active and you burn through energy pretty well  

i think you can probably have about 25 grams of  sugar per day that would be about two to three  

fruits a day and i wouldn't suggest you have it  365 days a year but you could probably do this  

most of the time and not really mess with your  metabolic health if you go most of the year  

without fruit but you have some apple trees  in the back and you only eat fruit seasonally  

and you are fit and you're maintaining you're  in good metabolic health then i think you can  

really sort of pig out during that seasonal  growth you could probably eat almost as much  

fruit as you want and have maybe a hundred grams  just be prepared that you will put on some weight  

you will get more hungry and that's the key  to understand here that if you have reversed  

a metabolic condition and you're now in  maintenance it's not just about the grams  

of sugar it is what does it do to your hunger  signals if you can eat a couple of fruits  

and it doesn't mess with your hunger then you're  probably fine but if you've really struggled and  

you've found that the only way that you  can control your hunger the only way you  

can have some stable mood and energy is to eat  extremely low carb and avoid all forms of sugar  

then you probably can't have that amount of  fruit not because your body couldn't tolerate  

it metabolically but because it would change your  behavior and make you lose control again so all of  

these are factors that you have to account for and  then there is the extreme example of a cleanse or  

doing something for a therapeutic purpose so i'm  not saying that most people should do this but  

i'm not also saying that no one could ever do it  i think it's insanity to do it as a lifestyle but  

as a cleanse if you were to do only fruit or only  juice for a short period of time therapeutically  

there are some benefits to that there are  various different therapies like the gerson  

therapy that reverses cancer rather successfully  that basically live primarily off of fruit juice  

just understand that there's always a trade-off  that while you're allowing your liver to cleanse  

in one regard you're also overloading it with  a bunch of fructose so different people could  

react differently to that and i wouldn't jump  into that without studying a lot and also maybe  

having some guidance from someone with experience  who can monitor and help you along fruit is often  

called nature's candy and that's how you want to  think of it as a treat it's not that you can never  

eat it just don't think of it as something healthy  that the more you eat the better off you are but  

if you're given the choice between fruit or  man-made artificial junk then obviously go  

for fruit every time if you enjoyed this video  you're going to love that one and if you truly  

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