This is not true. You may be confused with cyanide compounds or their precursors. Many fruit and nut seeds contain such compounds which are naturally made in the metabolic processes of the plant. Almonds and relatives are common examples but there is some in apple seeds.
These compounds are unlike arsenic which is an element that cannot be made by the plant and could only be present if the plant took it up from the environment. Any environment rich in arsenic would have plenty of other problems aside from producing apples whose seeds contained arsenic, probably nothing would grow there including apple trees.
The point about having to eat a very large quantity for the seeds to have any effect is correct though. Domestication of edible plants involves selection for traits that make them better foodstuff. Reduction of toxic and bad tasting compounds is one of the important aims of selective breeding. Having said that I wouldnât set out to eat a bucket of bitter almonds or apple seeds just to see what happens.
Just to clarify, arsenic occurs naturally in all soils at varying concentrations. In Australia, the background levels (or the levels which are known to occur naturally are in the range of 0.2-30mg/kg). Arsenic can be taken up by plants and one such plant is rice, where arsenic become more available under waterlogged soil conditions and is present in the seed/grain.
Hiya BBG thank you so much for the ratification with regard to my apple seed comment.
Goodness me, I had absolutely no idea about the TRUTH of these âold wives talesâ⊠- who would have guessed?
I sincerely thank you for going to the trouble to learn the facts of the matter, and taking the time to post the facts so that we could all learn about the truth of apple juice/seeds arsenic AND cyanide.
My Monday has never been so educational before, and I must make more time to read the Choice Forum!
The point I was trying to make (in a very tongue-in-cheek way) was that the big food companies try to imply that ânatural sugarâ is good for you. The word ânaturalâ is deliberately misleading, would they try to say that their product is OK if it contained ânaturalâ arsenic? Of course not! Arsenic will kill you fairly quickly, fructose will kill you slowly (like tobacco or asbestos). Getting the public health warning out regarding fructose is proving just as hard as the tobacco campaign, but we will win because the science is with us.
Everything in dietary âscienceâ is not good/bad,healthy/unhealthy in an absolute sense.
For many edibles there is âevidenceâ of some sort claiming âitâ is bad for us. If one considers the broad evidence of sugars in the diet, they are both unavoidable and required, and good for us in moderation. The problem is humans like sugars and are prone to over-indulge, and business being profit driven, not community or health driven, caters to what consumers will buy and has a âdepartmentâ to develop something else to sell, good, bad, or indifferent.
One just need track the sales and some reasons for the genre of products receiving the Shonky VitaGummies award. Why humans do what we do is not always obvious, nor manageable. There are still smokers, and Americans love their guns despite demonstrably bad life outcomes for each.
Studies surrounding sugars have more scientific merit than the dodgy tobacco studies peddled by the companies, but since the body processes carbohydrates into sugars the only way to avoid sugars is to stop eating. How does one go with no carbohydrates and no sugars? The issue is amount, not sugars per se.
Water and some foods contain natural arsenic leeched from the soils in trace amounts, and for that matter while radiation is bad for us, the earth emits background radiation, and neither have been shown to be health hazards until they reach a certain level. Worries about RF energy? That is for another topic. But so it goes with most things.
It is also important to accept that the complexities of the human condition usually make it difficult-to-impossible to perfectly isolate anything, and everything affects everything else, although sometimes the prevalence of an outcome can be reasonably linked to a particular behaviour that is sufficient for cause-and-effect. Double-blind studies are as good as it gets whenever ethics and morality are included in the process. Then there are usually exceptions at the individual level, as with some reacting badly to vaccines and some have life threatening allergies.
We each name our âpoisonâ. It is often said that the only unavoidable things in life are death and taxes, but sometimes the tax man actually loses out.
Not necessarily. Almost all foods ânaturallyâ contain sugars. This includes fruits and vegetables (~fructose and glucose), dairy/milk products (~lactose), cereals (~dextrose, maltose etc), pulses (~glucose etc) and so on. Even coffee and tea has natural sugars. The main food groups which generally donât contain natural sugars are meats and unadulterated water.
The problem is when sweeteners are added to processed foods to change the taste and in attempt to make the food more appealing to ones taste buds. While sugar is a natural product and has been advertised that way, the problem arises when ânaturalâ sugar or other refined sugar products are added to food to substantially increasing the sugar content of such foods. The added sugar often is more readily taken up by the body as it isnât contained in the same cellular matrix as natural sugar in foods. Added sugar also easily and significantly increases the calorific value of the foods it is added to which can result in weight gain and fatty tissue formation when consumed in excess.
There is also evidence that foods such as legumes that have natural sugars, actually moderate blood sugar levels which is especially important for diabetics.
In a post I made much earlier in this thread I did make a reference to the effect of the dosage see:
But yes it is worthwhile reiterating it again and in regards to sugar it certainly is heading towards if it hasnât already achieved that level of insertion of it into our diets.
I do wish commentators and nutritionists would stop talking about âadded sugarâ. It is irrelevant where the sugar in our food comes from. It is the percentage of âsugarsâ in the food which matters, whatever itâs origin.
I put the âsugarsâ in italics to emphasize that this how it is reported in Nutrition Information Panels [NIP] on processed foods packages. It is better than no guide, but it is misleading in that is does not indicate the type of sugars involved. Sucrose, which is derived principally from sugar-cane and sugar-beet, comprises a double molecule of glucose and fructose. Glucose is the energy source which drives just about all living creatures. Nearly all the food we eat is converted to glucose by the process of metabolism.
The one carbohydrate which is not metabolised as glucose is fructose [aka fruit sugar]. We need about 10 grams per day to assist glucose to penetrate the cell walls. Anything in excess of this goes directly to the liver where it is converted to fat, which is deposited around the vital organs [adipose fat]. Australians currently consume about 30g of fructose per day, and in the U.S.A. it is higher.
Apart from causal links to many diseases, the three major effects of excessive fructose consumption are:
(1) Suppression of the gut hormones which control satiety - which is why obese people can eat and eat when they are not hungry - their brain is not getting the âfullâ message.
(2) It affects the production of insulin in the pancreas which leads to Type-2 Diabetes; which is why so many obese people suffer from this complaint.
(3) The fat produced from fructose also accumulates in the liver and leads to non-alcoholic the fatty-liver (cirrhosis).
So please stop talking about âadded sugarsâ and give credence to the only figure that matters, total sugars, and in particular, fructose.
Great post john31 !
This is what I have been saying all along (see my other posts above). A glass of fresh pure apple juice is not healthy, it contains massive amounts of fructose which will hit your digestive system like a bomb. It has no added sugar but this is totally irrelevant.
Added sugar, total sugar, meh, doesnât really bother me. In general, the amount of processing a food has had is inversely proportional to how healthy it is. Everything else is irrelevant. Juice, âhealthyâ snack bars, please. There are some exceptions but Iâm not going to agonise over food labels. The best foods often donât have food labels. And no, Iâm not worried about fruit. Sweetened drinks are especially bad.
Thatâs right. regular drinking of juice isnât a healthy option. Many people think orange juice is healthy because it is made from oranges, which when consumed as a whole fruit is a healthy food option.
Juices are a processed or refined food. Juices per say donât occur naturally, with exception of possibly coconut juice/water. (coconut water incidentally had a sugar content of about 2.5%, while processed fruit juices can be 4 or more times this).
Sugar is also a refined product. Sugarcane juice (squeezed stem) is around 73% sugar. This juice is then refined further to remove impurities (non-sugar components) resulting in sugar contents close to 100%.
There is a difference between sugar occurring naturally in foods and added sugar. Using fruit for example, when one eats fruit one also usually eats the cells containing the juices (the âsolidâ fruit part). The body needs more energy to process the fruit and the natural sugar contained within the fruit. The fruit also contains other nutrients, vitamins, fibre etc. If the same type of sugar is eaten as an additive to a food, then this sugar requires far less energy to be absorbed by the body and is more readily taken up by the body. Added sugar is also close to 100% sugar without any of the nutritional benefits of eating while foods.
Furthermore, it would be quite easy to drink say 500mL of apple juice, but one eating 6 apples which would be the equivalent amount of juice would be far more difficult. Drinking juice leads to excessive sugar consumption as it is refined/processed fruit product. This website has some interesting pictures of how much fruit makes a cup of juice.
Total sugar and added sugar are both important. If a product contains a high percentage of added sugar, then the food is more than likely to contain sugar which is readily taken up by the body. If the food a zero percentage of added sugar, then most of the sugar (depending on how much it is processed), is contained within the foods itself. If the foods are highly processed, such as juices, then the readily available sugar will be higher than the same food when unprocessed.
This is the second or third time that you have supplied videos and talks by activists as evidence of your assertion that fructose is a poison. You have been asked for scientific studies to support your claims. Where are they?
You mention David Gillespie ( not the MP who is also a doctor). For those who donât know him Gillespie is not a health professional and AFAIK has no relevant qualifications. He makes his living as an âauthor, speaker and entrepreneurâ. For another view of him by those who are qualified try :this link.
Unless you can come up with more reliable evidence your claims are no different to a million others on the internet pushing a barrow - or making a quid.
Really? I canât think of a time when my stomach exploded after drinking a glass of apple juice.
Iâm afraid all this talk about fructose being a poison etc, with no evidence at all, is getting a bit tiring. Since, as I wrote about consumed fructose in this thread last year, >> various refereed studies show that ~30-60% of fructose is converted to glucose, Iâm pretty sure the main problem is excess calories combined with a sedentary lifestyle, where any excess calories get converted to fat. Hence the quite reasonable demand to know added sugar in another thread.
If you are happy with annecdotal evidence, I eat very large amounts of fruit, both fresh and dried, and have done so for much of my life (quite a few decades), but am not overweight, and dont have diabetes. However, I have always been very active, and made use of the fructose, glucose and other sugars, rather than accumulate them as fat.
Oh dear! Please google Dr Robert Lustig. He is an authority on the subject. His youtube videos are easy to understand and he does present the scientific evidence. His latest is very comprehensive; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4sRsb0a30Y
I mentioned David Gillespie because he is Australian and has written some excellent books which do stand up to scientific analysis. The comments by Nutrition Australia are simply incorrect. As Dr Lustig states, the tide has turned; health authorities now starting to recognise the problems of fructose when it is not contained in fruit. Dr Lustig is not an âactivistâ, he has had to treat people with disease caused by the fructose epidemic. The same arguments are being used by the âfructose deniersâ that were used to prolong the use of tobacco. Watch the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4sRsb0a30Y
This offhand denial isnât helpful, we already know you think that. Nutrition Australia make a dozen specific criticisms of Gillespie here, where is your rebuttal?
Watching Lustigâs polemic an hour and thirty nine minutes long is not a good use of my time.
You make comparisons with tobacco yet it was establishment medicine that destroyed tobacco; how come they are wrong now?
If the âtide has turnedâ how is it that nutrition advisers and health departments around the world still recommend fruit as part of a balanced diet? Those organisations all say excess sugar intake in general is bad for health and has a role in causing obesity. Where are their recommendations explicitly against fructose?
This is fun. The rebuttal is the work of Dr Lustig and others. The hour and thirty minutes you should spend watching his video might just save your life, it is certainly an adequate rebuttal to Nutrition Australia.
The extreme exception that they have taken to David Gillespie leads me to suspect that this organisation is a front for the processed food/sugar industry.
If you watch Dr Lustig you will see that âestablished medicineâ is now catching up with him, and yes previous thoughts on âsugarâ were wrong (just like the previous âestablished medicineâ on tobacco was wrong.
I said above (and David Gillespie & Dr Lustig) that a few pieces of fresh fruit per day is OK. One of the problems is that in many of the statements people and organisations make they fail to distinguish between the OK sugars and fructose; it is the fructose which is the problem. Fructose is half of table sugar (the other half is glucose).
The reason that I have contributed over 20% of the comment on this thread is that trolls/industry sycophants (out-of-work tobacco salesmen) keep twisting the truth and pretending that they donât understand and refuse to look at the overseas experts like Dr Lustig.
