Fruit - an interesting article

Macha

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2245266,00.html

Extract:

"It's a myth that fruit is packed full of vitamins and minerals," says Tom Sanders, who is director of the Nutritional Sciences Division at King's College London. "The foods packed full of micronutrients are grains, seeds and nuts, the peas and things." Bagged salad? "It's mainly water. Dark green vegetables are a good source of some vitamins, such as vitamin A and folate, but lettuce hasn't got much going for it at all. The really sad thing is that we don't eat enough vegetables, such as cabbage, spinach and broccoli."

Mellor

Nothing new there really, its well know that lettece, cucumber, celery are mainly water. Infact celery can contain less calories than you burn eating it.
If you look at a list of foods with Vitamin C in them, oranges are pretty far down the list, common veggies are miles higher. Some fruits are as good as veggies though.

Oranges for example have 50mg of Vit C per 100g
Strawberries have 60mg
Kiwi and broccolli 90mg
red Pepper 190mg
Blackcurrent 2000mg

Rose hips a staggering 2000mg
Thats 40x as much as an orange.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_c#Plant_sources
Check out other vitamins for similar lists

Fresh mushrooms have as much Vit D as 20+ glasses of milk

Macha

Yeah its just I know a lot of people who think eating fruit = healthy. They're under the impression that fruit is 'detoxing' and cancels out all the other crap they eat, lack of exercise, and high alcohol/smoke habits.

I hate the superfood hype from the media

ApeXaviour

taconnol wrote: »

Yeah its just I know a lot of people who think eating fruit = healthy. They're under the impression that fruit is 'detoxing' and cancels out all the other crap they eat, lack of exercise, and high alcohol/smoke habits.

Modern fruits are bred to be very high in sugar. Compare cultivated blackberries to wild, granny smiths to cooking apples... you get the picture. Most packaged or tinned fruit tends to even have added sugar in it in the form of syrup. This boggles me...

taconnol wrote: »

I hate the superfood hype from the media

Ditto. My parents (bless them) bought me some "OMEGA 3 biscuits". The operative word and number being plastered in large yellow letters across the pack. I look at the ingredients, they consist of "Enriched flour, vegetable oil (nasty stuff with uber amounts of omega-6 in them), brown sugar glucose syrup, maltodextrin, linseed, baking soda, salt etc."
Right so there's nothing wrong with linseed, it has ALA omega 3 which is inefficiently metabolised into the required EPA and DHA. The problem is this already inefficient metabolic process must compete with the one for omega 6 fats, that are overabundant in these cookies. So any possible good you could get from the linseed is not only cancelled but utterly reversed!
Not to mention the things were otherwise just pure white flour and sugar.

It gets me teeming I'll tell ya, it really does.