Fruits are nothing like candy, and it's sad that diet science has gone so backwards as to make this type of statement seem reasonable--that all of diet can be boiled down to carbs, fiber, protein, and fat.
A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way.
Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating.
Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
While you're not wrong, this needs a couple of qualifications:
1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents.
2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit.
3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added.
I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.
Once i read that the Bananas we bred would be to sweet for monkeys to consume. Not sure if this is true though.
Thankfully there are other goals than increasing sugar. Almonds were bred to a lower cyanide content to make em edible. Bet there are plenty other examples.
Vegetables and don't want to be eaten and protect themselves with mild "poison" or a strong shell. Fruit does and can be eaten raw. Vegetables need to be cooked to destroy antinutrients and help digestion. Egg and meat protein can be digested easier after denaturing the proteins through heat. Milk becomes digestible through the enzymes in Rennet. Cheese would make sense to me, no clue about fermented milk products.
> Once i read that the Bananas we bred would be to sweet for monkeys to consume. Not sure if this is true though.
The common banana we have today, the Cavendish, is actually a bit less sweet than the common banana before the 1960s.
Back then, it was the Gros Michel, which was sweeter and more flavorful[1]. But these bananas are all a monoculture, clones, and the Gros Michel was wiped out by a disease. The Cavendish is currently in the process of being devastated by a new disease as well, so it's very possible that future generations will be eating a different banana than we are.
[1] One of the reasons why a lot of banana-flavored candy only roughly resembles banana is because it tastes like a Gros Michel, not a Cavendish. Candymakers don't change it because that's the flavor that people have come to expect and want from that candy.
> 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents.
I keep reading that, but I experienced (and also heard) the opposite. Store-bought fruit are engineered for maximum shelf-life, size, and looks, primarily. At expense of taste, including sweetness. Organic produce or just garden grown fruits are smaller and uglier, but far sweeter.
The Red Delicious apple is very much red, and very much not delicious. But it does have shelf life and looks going for it.
Organic produce doesn't have an appreciably better taste in my experience, nor is it necessarily smaller, but garden-grown definitely wins for flavor - you can optimize the time of picking for the sometimes incredibly narrow window of ripeness. I haven't grown them in several years, but I used to plant strawberries every year. I'd get 2-3 perfectly ripe strawberries a day, and they were delicious.
Raspberries are another fruit that has a very, very short shelf life. Even the commercial varieties are only good for about a week after picking, and I've read that the very best varieties for flavor are only good for about one day.
If you're doing anything with berries where flavor is paramount, and whole-fruit texture is not (anything made from a puree), farm-fresh is best and frozen is a very close second. Flash-frozen fruits and vegetables lose the texture of fresh, but they are picked at peak ripeness and typically frozen within an hour or two.
> 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents.
Interesting. Also of note, fruits and the fruits of vegetables world wide seem to be increasing in size and caloric content while decreasing in nutritional content, correlated with rising atmospheric CO2.
CO2 fertilization effect. It's well known. Farmers have used CO2 enrichment for a long time to bring on crops in greenhouses. But the growing season is also getting longer, leading to some massive yield increases in places. Global greening.
But you cannot compare todays fruits to those that our bodies have evolved on. Over the last couple of thousand years we have selectively most (if not all) of them for higher sugar contents.
That is not to say that a diet should not contain fruits, it probably should and fruits are most definetly more nutritious than candy, but its not that black and white.
True, but still on a whole other level than candy. A snickers bar or coke hurts my teeth it is so sweet and a bag of gummies churns my gut. I feel fine after eating an apple. Fruits honestly don’t even seem that sweet unless you’re just eating those genetic modified grapes and new apples. Many (most?) fruits are quite tart. Maybe it’s my equatorial bias speaking and I eat a wider range of fruits than the average person, but I just don’t see fruits I enjoy as particularly sweet.
It seems the missing things when considering food composition is absorption and availability.
Calories alone are measured by burning things but it maters if your body has to do work to access those calories.
The more processed or broken down an ingredient is the more available those calories are to the body vs the same amount in its raw form.
I suspect, but don’t know, that liquid sugar in sodas is far worse than in fruit form because your digestive system isn’t processing fibre to get to it.
Think sweetcorn vs cornbread. They could have the same calories but processing cornflour means you’re unlikely to see it again in undigested form. That same can’t be said for raw sweetcorn.
A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way.
Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating.
Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.