Axel:
>1) I don't want to have a fruitarian diet, I want to have a good diet, if
>the cause, or one of the causes of my current state of health is eating
>unnaturally sweet foods. I wouldn't have any problem giving up fruits
>altoghether. Wouldn't this be the most sensible thing, after all? It
> puzzles me to read and learn so many negative things about currently available
>fruits, and hear that people who understand this keep eating them. Do I NEED
>this fruits at all?

Tom:
Strictly speaking, you don't need to eat fruits. One can live on sprouts
alone, or on a mono-diet, or on a diet of sprouts and vegetables alone.
The more restricted the diet, the more boring it is, which can cause
problems in the long run - most of us like some variety in life, and in our
diets. I see no problem at all with eating fruit, so long as one does not
overdo it.  (For some health conditions, like candida, diabetes, pancreas
disorders, etc., it may be advisable to eliminate fruit entirely for a while.)
Again, one should not fear fruit, or hate fruit: simply realize that it is not
the healthy food that some fruitarians claim it is, and limit your consumption
to an amount that your body can tolerate.

Axel:
>2) From Tom Billings last, educational post on fruitarianism, I got the
>impression (please tell me if I am wrong) that one of the problems with
>current fruits is they are low fiber. Is this so? I mean, is there some
>potential long-term damage that can be caused by eating lots of cucumbers,
>avocados and tomatoes, just because they are "too easy" on the digestive
> tract?

Tom:
The table I posted made the point that wild fruits are much higher in fiber
than cultivated fruits. Wild avocados are often very fibrous and hard to
eat, compared to cultivated. The wild vs cultivated mango comparison is
even more dramatic - I used to eat wild, seedling mangoes when I was a kid -
you can chew on the fiber for half an hour, if you want. Cultivated mangoes
have much less fiber.

Although lower in fiber than wild, I don't think the cultivated fruits are
necessarily deficient in fiber - i.e., they probably provide adequate fiber.

Axel:
>3) Is there any agreement about the plant food that men used to eat before
>settling down to cultivate? (proportions, kinds of foods, etc). It
>becoming increasingly apparent to me that sweet foods are RARE for human
>beings in the wild. Right or Wrong? Thus, health-wise, we should have no
>problem doing without them.

Tom:
There might be something on this in the recent Ward Nicholson interview in
"Health and Beyond". I suspect that the paleontological data is not sufficient
to accurately estimate proportions. Obviously, before cultivation, consumption
of plant foods was limited to wild foods. There are some sweet foods in the
wild, but they are not so common.

Axel:
>4) Among the foods we have access to, what are the ones that resemble wild
>fruit the most? (both sweet and non-sweet).

Tom:
Mulberries, blackberries, raspberries come to mind immediately; also tropical
guavas and passion fruits. Blueberries, cranberries may be close to wild.
Some of the minor tropical fruits have not been subjected to much varietal
selection: soursop, jaboticaba, mamey sapote, sapodilla. Note however, that
tropical fruits are subjected to heavy post-harvest processing, to ship them
to the markets in temperate zone countries. Perhaps others can add additional
temperate zone fruits to this list.

Axel:
>5) Another thing I am starting to suspect is that wild foods are naturally
>high fiber, more high fiber than most fruits. Is this so? But then, all the
>stuff we read about fruits having just enough fiber are not true. We need
>more fiber and less concentration of calories, right? Kirt in a recent post
>gives info about wild nuts being more starchy and fibrous than the ones we
>are familiar with. This would be similar to what happens with fruits.

Tom:
I mentioned fiber above. Unless you are experiencing problems that might suggest
a lack of fiber (like, say, constipation), and you are eating a lot of raw
vegetable foods, then you are almost certainly getting sufficient fiber. I
wouldn't worry about fiber. If you ate a lot of processed food, then there
might be good cause for concern.

Axel:
>Now there is a new image in my mind: the reason why I like fruits so much,
>can be compared to the reason why people like candy more than fruit. Wait, I
>am not saying bananas are addictive. NOt at all. I am saying they fool us,
>they easily become the prefered raw food for many people, both raw fooders
>adn conventional eaters. And now it turns out I will have to use REASON, and
>love for myself, to avoid something I used to think of as "perfectly
> natural".

Tom:
Very true. In a recent talk, Brian Clement characterized us as a nation of sugar
addicts because we eat well over 100 times the sugar that people ate 100 years
ago (when sugar production was dominated by cartels, and the price charged for
it was relatively high).

Tom Billings
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