Ashley’s answer: Fruit is both nature’s sweetheart and nature’s cleanup crew. It should make a daily visit to your body to keep things moving, courtesy of its brightly colored skins and plethora of nourishing nutrients. But too much fruit can actually work against our health. Here are some guidelines to follow when it comes to fruit:
- Become a conscious fruit consumer. If the fruit in question is on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen list, eating it daily (or more) is too much. These fruits are the highest in pesticides, so you might want to limit your intake. Try frozen organic if fresh organic is too pricy or isn’t available.
- Juice is not a fruit. Fruit juice is closer to drinking fruit sugar than it is to eating a fruit, which means that you have to be very careful about quantity (and quality). Just 4 ounces of juice is a serving. In its liquid form, fruit sugar bypasses digestion, often leading to blood sugar spikes. If your body is busy handling other sugar, or sluggish after some years of being challenged, it won’t be able to clear that sugar out of your blood as easily. I recommend eating fruit, not drinking it. When you do drink it, cut it with water or non-starchy vegetables (remember that starchy vegetables like beets and carrots create sugar, too.)
- Avoid a carb overload. Fruit is great at providing carbohydrates for quick energy, but too much carbohydrate at one time overwhelms the blood (think of a crowded highway) and creates fat. So keep it to one serving of fruit—that’s about the size of your fist for some fruits, but as little as one or two pieces for others like dates—per eating occasion, which means every three hours. Fruit counts as your carb source, which means you don’t need rice, beans, bread, or sweet potato fries when you have fruit. Ashley Koff is a registered dietitian, Qualitarian, nutrition expert, and
