Kevin (Jim Culhane):
>Hi JL and Tom,
> My perspective would be that God created fruit for us, and that it was
>originally in a much better state than what we get now. But it would have
>been sweet, enjoyable. I disagree that "sugar is sugar" -- the highly
>processed sugar in the candy bar is dead, more like a drug, than the organic,
>living fruit sugars in fresh fruit. I don't understand why you would think
>that they are the same. Perhaps you could elaborate?
Tom:
At the molecular level, the sugar in fruit (sucrose) is the same as the sucrose
sold as white sugar in stores. You are correct in pointing out that the fruit
is a raw food, while candy is usually cooked and dead. The point that I was
making is that excess sugar - whether from fruit or candy (or other source)
is bad for you, and that excess fruit consumption can produce the symptoms of
excess sugar - which can occur if one eats a lot of candy. Of course, candy has
a lot of other bad things in it and can cause other problems. [P.S. fruits
usually have at least 3 types of sugar: glucose, fructose, sucrose.]
I would also point out that modern fruit is sweet because of many years (in some
cases thousands of years) of human directed varietal selection and plant
breeding. Pineapples that grow wild usually produce a sour, inedible fruit -
dramatic contrast to sweet, cultivated pineapples. Crab apples, the predecessor
of the modern apple, have 1/20 the sugar of the 'Red Delicious', and so on.
Some wild fruit is sweet, but most is not. I have a table that compares wild
and cultivated fruit, and can send you a copy if you wish. That table summarizes
the major differences between the two types of fruits.
Regards,
Tom Billings
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