On many occasions, patients have asked me whether it’s okay to eat fruit. They’re worried about whether they should eat a food that they know is rich in sugar. Let’s think about this for a minute. Does anyone really believe that fruit is what’s causing the epidemics of diabetes and obesity? You can rest assured that the obesity and diabetes epidemics are not being caused by fruit. I think of fruit as “nature’s candy” and while it’s true that some fruits contain a lot of sugar, it is always accompanied by a large amount of fiber.

As long as the sugar in the food you choose to eat is enclosed within a fiber matrix, you can feel free to eat fruit. And as long as your doctor hasn’t diagnosed you with a significant blood sugar problem (like uncontrolled diabetes), you should know that fruit is, generally speaking, a good choice. And even if you are diabetic, there are only a very few fruits, mainly tropical fruits like mango and pineapple, that are likely to spike your blood sugar. You can figure it out yourself by checking your blood sugar 90 minutes after you eat. It should be back to normal by then, so if it isn’t that means what you ate contained more sugar than you were able to metabolize comfortably. 

This week I’m going to share a personal story. This story dates all the way back to 2002, which is the year I first decided that the time had come for me to stop eating commercially produced baked goods. This is a huge category in the American diet, and it includes most of the bread, crackers, bagels, muffins, waffles, pancakes, “breakfast” cereal, biscuits, cakes, cookies in the supermarkets, restaurants, hotel breakfast bars, and corner grocery stores. Virtually all of these products are made from stripped carbs like white flour, corn syrup, and sugar. Stripped carbs are nutritionally bankrupt. After they began to predominate in the market, the malnutrition they caused in the general population had everything to do with why the government passed legislation requiring that white flour be “enriched” prior to its use in products made from it. The reason whole-grain wheat does not require enrichment is because it has not been stripped of its nutrients in the first place. 

Like most people I know, I ate gobs of white flour and other stripped carbs. So when I stopped eating it, I was pretty hungry. That’s because, at first, I didn’t know what to eat instead. So I looked in my kitchen cabinets and found something that seemed like it might work. Dried fruit. Raisins, apricots, prunes, dried apples. There were plenty of packages to choose from. I brought some to work for a mid-afternoon snack. The dried fruit was pretty good, satisfying and filling, and it did the trick. The afternoon went by more easily, and I no longer arrived home famished and exhausted. 

True confession: Sometimes, usually because I had run out of dried fruit, I ran over to the local ice cream shoppe right across the street from my office to get a vanilla milkshake. That’s because I still really had no idea what to eat. 

But there’s an important take-home message here, and this is it: Even though my intake of dried fruit increased a lot, and despite the occasional milkshake, the weight fell off and the inches disappeared. Within just a few weeks, my clothes fit a lot better. That weight did not come back, and you can believe me when I say that I never missed it.

Nowadays I might eat apple slices, maybe with a spoonful of peanut butter; cucumber slices dipped in hummus with olive oil; oatmeal with raisins; or a handful of nuts. But in those days I wasn’t sure what to choose if it wasn’t going to be those cheeze crackers or sunny chips that always beckoned from the vending machine down the hall.

This is precisely the personal experience that made me realize we were operating under some fundamental misconceptions. Here I was eating dried fruit, which I’d been taught to avoid due to its high sugar content, and the weight was falling off. I stopped advising my patients to avoid dried fruit.

So yes, you should feel free to eat fruit. Fresh, frozen, or dried. With little or no added sugar, if you were wondering.