Confidence: Likely.

I am here to clear fruit’s name against the accusations that have been made. Fruit is one of the healthiest types of foods—perhaps the healthiest food group—and we should bestow upon it the shining reputation it deserves.

Contents

• Contents
• Fruit is innocent of the charge of “too much sugar”
• Fruit is more than vitamins
• Fruit is innocent of the charge of “doesn’t taste good”
  • My recipe for a delicious strawberry dessert
  • My recipe for a banana treat
• Notes

Fruit is innocent of the charge of “too much sugar”

Most of the calories in fruit come from sugar. Fruits don’t have a lot of complex carbs or fats or protein. But that’s okay.

Sugar is basically bad for three reasons:

1. It tastes good which leads you to overeat, and then you get fat.
2. It raises your blood sugar which then raises insulin, which (a) stimulates hunger and (b) can cause your body to become resistant to insulin, which can eventually lead to diabetes.
3. It’s fast-digesting which is generally bad for gut health.

But none of these charges apply to fruit:

1. Fruit is calorie-sparse. It’s hard to overeat whole fruit.
2. Fruit does not raise blood sugar much (mainly because it contains a lot of fiber).
3. Fruit is slow-digesting (mainly because of the aforementioned fiber).

Fruit juice is a different story—it’s calorie-dense and it doesn’t contain fiber. But I’m not here to defend fruit juice, I’m here to defend fruit.

Fruit is more than vitamins

Two claims I’ve often heard repeated:

1. You don’t need to take a multivitamin.
2. Fruit is good for you because it has vitamins.

Doesn’t that seem a bit contradictory? Do you need more vitamins, or don’t you?

The truth is, fruit isn’t just about vitamins. Fruits contain a lot of other good stuff, too.¹

Fruits contain thousands of phytochemicals. “Phyto” means “plant”, so “phytochemical” means “a chemical that’s in a plant”. It’s not much of a revelation to say that fruits (which, as you may know, grow on plants) contain plant chemicals.

The reason why that matters is because many of these thousands of phytochemicals are probably good for you.

A vitamin is a carbon-based molecule that is essential for health. There are either 13 or 14 vitamins, depending on whether you include choline. But there are many other phytochemicals that are probably beneficial for health without being essential. I say “probably” because it’s difficult to definitively prove that a phytochemical is healthy. Vitamins are obvious because you develop dramatic health problems if you stop getting them.

There is moderate evidence that eating fruit improves health and decreases disease risk.² Various phytochemicals in fruit are known or suspected to play a role in promoting good health:

• Phytosterols have been shown in clinical trials to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.³ They are present in many fruits as well as vegetables, vegetable oils, and grains.
• Carotenoids—which give the red or orange color to tomatoes, pumpkins, and carrots—may decrease the risk of head or neck cancer, but the evidence is not conclusive.⁴

There are way too many phytochemicals to list. A few (like phytosterols) are highly likely to be healthy; many (like carotenoids) have some supporting evidence; for most of them, we don’t know what they do.

Randomized experiments that give people supposedly-healthy phytochemical supplements have often failed to find effects.⁵ It seems that you need to eat whole plants to get the bulk of the benefits, but I don’t know why that is. Maybe we’re wrong about which phytochemicals are the most important for health, and the experiments were supplementing the wrong ones?⁶ There are over 50,000 known phytochemicals, so it will be quite a while before we figure out what they all do. Best to just eat whole fruit.

(And eat other whole foods, too. But today I’m advocating for fruit.)

Some people say fruits contain a lot of fiber. That’s true. But I don’t think that alone is a great reason to eat fruit—lots of foods contain fiber. I think phytochemicals are the more compelling reason. Fruits probably contain healthy phytochemicals that you can’t get anywhere else.

That’s also why it’s important to eat a variety of fruit. Blueberries contain anthocyanins, oranges contain naringenin, apples contain…I don’t know, some other phytochemicals that are probably good for you that aren’t in blueberries or oranges.

Fruit is innocent of the charge of “doesn’t taste good”

Okay, taste is subjective, I can’t convince you that fruit tastes good. I just don’t understand what is going on inside people’s mouths that leads them to dislike fruit. I really don’t understand people who dislike fruit but like vegetables. Vegetables are boring! Fruit tastes like candy!

Maybe it will help if I give some of my favorite fruit recipes.

My recipe for a delicious strawberry dessert

Ingredients: 5 to 10 strawberries.

Cooking instructions:

1. Wash the strawberries.
2. Eat the strawberries. Be sure not to eat the green parts.

My recipe for a banana treat

Ingredients: one banana.

Cooking instructions:

1. Open the banana peel.
2. Eat the banana.

Posted on Jun 08, 2025

Notes