I’ve been told all my life that sugar in fruit is “healthy” but sugar in soda isn’t? Is there any real difference or are they basically the same thing?
Edit to add additional sources.
As long as you eat whole fruit (with fiber) there doesn’t seem to be any issue.
“Seventeen people were made to eat twenty servings a day of fruit. Despite the extraordinarily high fructose content of this diet, presumably about 200 grams a day—8 cans of soda worth—the investigators reported no adverse effects (and possible benefit actually) for body weight, blood pressure, and insulin and lipid levels (fats in the blood) after three to six months. More recently, Jenkins and colleagues put people on about a twenty-servings-of-fruit-a-day diet for a few weeks, and no adverse effects on weight or blood pressure or triglycerides, and an astounding 38-point drop in LDL cholesterol.”
Be warned though….
“There was one side effect, though. Given the 44 servings of vegetables they had on top of all that fruit, they recorded the largest bowel movements apparently ever documented in a dietary intervention.”
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/flashback-friday-how-much-fruit-is-too-much/
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/if-fructose-is-bad-what-about-fruit/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23365108/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20564476/
Nearly all of the sugar in a juice/soda will be extrinsic: sugar added to foods that is not bound up in the structure of a food. In reverse, intrinsic sugar is found bedded into the structure or cells of foods like fruit and vegetables. Foods higher in intrinsic sugars are likely to have a lower Glyceamic Index meaning that the energy those sugars provide is released more slowly as the food is digested
They are basically the same thing when it comes to fructose or sucrose BUT added sugar comes as an add on for the taste and/or preservation. This is just an additional unnecessary load in the food.
While in fruits it’s part of the natural growth and is bound to fiber. That means your body has to work a lot more to extract the sugar components themselves sometimes even isn’t able to extract it and drops it via your digestion system.
Chemically, your body breaks it down the same, but fruits have the added benefit of fiber and nutrients that slow the breakdown of that sugar. You won’t get a sugar high and crash from fruit like you would from a soda because of that. Fruit is still great for you :)
Experts will be better at explaining this, but generally no, they’re not really different. The protective factor in fruits is said to be fiber, as it helps in preventing the spike in blood glucose levels. There are different kinds of sugars, sure, but generally, as far as I’m concerned, your body reacts to them fairly similarly.
Fructose is processed by the liver, table sugar is broken down by the digestive tract into fructose and glucose, while complex carbs other than fiber are broken down into glucose. However complex carbs and fruit are broken diwn much more slowly if eaten in larger amounts than sable sugar. Fruit has less sugar per unit of edible volume than table sugar. It has much more vitamins, minerals, water and fiber too. So the only things you should really concerned about (generally) is how fast you are increasing the blood glucose, and to some extent your total fructose and calorie consumption. Consuming too much fat or having too much body fat though, decreases insulin sensitivity. Insulin production (which apart from putting on too much body fat, is the essential thing that you want to reduce if you are worried avoid developing type 2 diabetes) is not just high if blood glucose becomes too high; it is also high for high protein foods as well as high fat and high sugar foods. It’s really just a function of how fast you consume calories. The worst things for raising blood glucose too fast are table sugar and high fructose corn syrup laden drinks. Second, you want to keep total calories below you weight maintenance requirements. Third, you want to avoid drinking large fruit smoothies and juices really fast or eating a whole plate of garlic bread, rice, oats, or pasta or pizza at a time, or generally eating more than 1000 calories per 4-hour period.
It’s not as severe as eating direct sugar or soda, cake etc. I’d use the word severe and not “bad”.
Let’s look this way. If you are diabetic, you can’t eat a lot of fruits. Why? Of the of the sugar/carbs in the fruit. So to answer your question you eat too much fruits, obviously they are carbs and it will raise your insulin. You trying to lose weight, it would affect that.
Technically, they’re broken down into the same components, which is glucose. The main thing that matters is absorption.
Fibrous fruits are complex carbs that digest and absorb slower than simple carbs like candy.
Fruit sugar is fructose.
Soda sugar can be any combination of sucrose (50-50 glucose-fructose) with HFCS (55-45 fructose-glucose).
The MAIN problem is the difference in quantity between sugars present in sodas vs whole fruits. Its night and day.
Healthy depends on quantity and source of sugar. Whole fruits also provide a whole lot of nutrients that’s sodas don’t have
Sugar in Fruits is bundled with good nutrition including vitamins and phytonutrients. Sugar in soda and soft drinks is bundled with zero nutrition and questionable ingredients like artificial colors etc.
If you remember how fruit tasted right off the vine or a tree when you were a kid can testify to the idea that fruit is much bigger and sweeter today. My gut feeling says that because of this, fruit can be problematic if it’s anything more than the occasional treat in your diet.
100 years ago, the fiber probably did great blunting the effect of the fructose on ones blood sugar. I’d speculate that’s not the case today for most fruits.
I really really wish we could eat a sample of fruits today vs 100 years ago to drive home the idea of how much different it is today.
Natural sugars will always be healthier than added sugars. I think of it as, the less something is processed, the better. Added sugars come from the sugar cane plant. They have to process that to get sugar granuals and so on.
However if we want to be technical you really just want to look our for complex sugars and carbohydrates. Like High Fructose Corn syrup and Saturated anything.
Rather than focusing on the one nutrient, it’s important to look at the context and pattern. When people eat large amounts of fruit, it typically leads to better health outcomes. So who cares that there’s sugar? This typically includes people who have or at risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weight gain.
The problem comes when you use the term “natural sugar” or “sugar from whole fruit”, but it’s not in the context of whole fruit. If it’s a concentrate of the fruit juice, and it’s added to other things, it’s still added sugar. But it you’re just having a bunch of apples, pears, oranges, mangos, banana, whatever, the risk is quite low and the benefit potential is quite high.
Obviously within reason, anything I’d problematic in high amounts (whether we’re talking fruit, veggies, whole grains, dairy, meat, whatever). But rarely is the whole fruit a problem factor in a diet.
Basically, sugar inside whole fresh/frozen fruit is perfectly healthy. Eat a real apple and you are good, for example.
Sugar extracted from fruit and put in something else, like fruit juice, is unhealthy.
Lots of good answers here, but I feel this cannot be stated enough -
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OMG YES!
Real fruit is great for you. Do not worry about sugar in whole fruits or vegetables (al the fiber and water).
Fructose (fruit sugar) is incredibly damaging when removed from the plant, e.g. refined sugars like cane sugar, corn syrup, coconut sugar (not actually made from coconuts) and fruit juice (e.g. apple, orange, pineapple juice).
Check out Dr. Robert Lustig’s website for more information.
https://robertlustig.com
I mean, it depends on what you are referring to. If you are trying to lose weight, then yes fruit has too much sugar so you would try to avoid it. But you can’t refer to sugar as healthy or unhealthy, because sugar doesn’t change regardless of what substance it is in. And it is not unhealthy for our bodies either, our bodies have evolved to use sugar in its metabolism and it needs a certain amount of sugar to function each day.
The problem with things like juice and soda is that there is a large amount of sugar in them while offering little otherwise. This makes it likely for you to go over the threshold of how much sugar you need and eat an excessive amount of sugar.
So say you need 500g of sugar a day, 50 fat, 100 fiber etc.*. A glass of juice will contain 100g of juice, and if you drink five cups then you’ve gotten the amount of sugar you need to eat in a day. But that’s not the only thing you’ll need to eat, you need to get your fiber and fat somewhere right? So you eat some yogurt and fruit, and you can easily get another 500g of sugar by doing that, so you’ve doubled the amount of sugar your body needs, and that’s when it becomes unhealthy.
Plus, drinking juice or other added sugar just dumps a bunch of sugar into your system, but sugar found naturally needs to be extracted by your body, so your body needs to work. If your body doesn’t work for a long time, it will get lazy and won’t want to work even if you’ve stopped consuming sugar in excess. And that will become a problem eventually because you can get diabetes etc.*I’ve pulled these numbers out of my arse, don’t get on me because of them.
Sugar in fruit is broken down more slowly, under like sugar in drinks or even fruit juice, which is absorbed fast by the body. Although fruit contains antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals,, and fiber, its still not a good idea to over indulge to excess.
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https://www.eatthis.com/fruit-sugar/#:\~:text=Is%20fruit%20sugar%20good%20for%20you%3F%20Countless%20studies,whole%20fruits%2C%20you%27re%20also%20getting%20plenty%20of%20fiber.
In a general sense, “natural” sugar from fruit called fructose is easier than many added sugars for your body to break down and turn into energy but there are a lot of other factors involved in how your body reacts to different foods.
the sugar itself is the same - pretty much the same molecules and it would behave almost identical to “sugar in soda” if you were to extract it either and consume it pure or added elsewhere. the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts though so sugar in fruit is not consumed alone but with all the rest of the fruit, which contains undigestible matter, water, vitamins and traces of other substances which are not worth tracking. in this context, it behaves differently and is harmless
Not in fruit juice. It’s still sugar. If you eat the whole fruit with the fiber, the sugar is metabolized differently, so is better for you. If you crush it up in a smoothie, same thing. But apple juice is basically no better than soda, except for the chemicals and caffeine.
It’s hard to gain weight eating fruit, given that it’s low in calories.
But adding a ton of sugar to food that is already high in calories (fatty, large portions) is basically adding calories that only provide energy for no benefit beyond taste.
Sugar isn’t bad for being sugar, it’s bad for being just energy.Fruit provides nutrients and fibre.
While fructose (fruit sugar) is the worst kind, biology wise, it’s offset in fruit by the fibre content slowing absorption.
as a stupid teenager, i understand it in a simple way therefore i can explain it super simply too.
sugar in fruit is fructose. and when you eat fruit, you get tons of other good shit like vitamins and micronutrients and water and fiber.
soda is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup which is kinda terrible for you. soda is just sugary carbonated water with fake colors and flavors. it gets absorbed super fast, and you body is like wtf dude why are you giving me all this sugar and chemicals and nothing else to digest along with it?
fruit provides lots of beneficial nutrients along with sugar, but soda is only sugar.