Tag Archives: fruit

The Paleo lowdown on eating fruit

Posted on 8 March, 2017 by Will Nicolson | 1 comment

It’s a question I’ve been asked time and again since becoming something of a health authority: is fruit paleo? An excellent question, and one which I usually don’t have enough hours in the day to answer in sufficient detail. This, in case you’re wondering, is not one of those times.

Can you eat fruit on a Paleo diet?

The short answer is: yes! While many “hardcore” Paleo punters wouldn’t be caught dead beside a bowl of fruit, it’s totally unreasonable, and in many cases unhealthy, to completely remove fruit from your life. Phew! Am I right?

But that affirmative isn’t your one-way ticket to a daily fruit binge. We know that our Paleolithic ancestors certainly ate fruit – the berries or drupes that they came across in the wild would have provided valuable nutrients and minerals to fill in the nutritional gaps of their predominantly protein-based diets. But what we also know is that those fruits were not the same as those we find on our supermarket shelves today.

If you’ve ever walked through a forest glade and noticed a patch of wild strawberries growing in the sunshine, you’ll know what I mean. Wild strawberries have almost no resemblance to their monstrous cultivated counterparts, and this is due to thousands of years of genetic selection. Some time after the agricultural revolution, around 10,000 years ago, humans began to alter those “wild” fruit species that our Paleolithic forebears foraged. People realized that by only selecting and growing those fruit variants that were larger, sweeter, or more edible, they could develop a whole new “species” of superfruit. This selective style of cultivation continued throughout the millennia, to give us the fruits we are sold today. Yes, even the organic, non-GMO fruit!

In many cases, this was an essential part of allowing humans to eat and enjoy a certain kind of fruit in the first place. For example, the uncultivated, wild version of bananas are actually virtually inedible. Their seed to flesh ratio is so high that it’s almost not worth bothering to eat them, but every now and then a sterile banana is produced that doesn’t have any seeds. It was those sterile bananas that people loved to eat, and they therefore started taking cuttings of the sterile plants and reproducing banana trees without all the seeds. Because they’re all sterile, the only way these trees can be reproduced is by vegetative propagation – taking part of the original tree to create an exact genetic copy of it.

I happen to love bananas, so I’m not going to begrudge those enterprising farmers for playing around with nature. But what these genetic selections means is that cultivated fruit is completely different to the wild fruit our ancestors ate. It’s generally sweeter (so far higher in fructose), less nutritionally dense…and there’s a whole lot more available today than there was 10,000+ years ago!

With this in mind, for the Paleo eater, fruit should become less of a “health food” and more of a nutritious treat. That orange juice with breakfast or fruit smoothie for lunch, by the way, is not what the doctor ordered.

Not all fruits were created equal, however, so if you’re going to get your daily dose of fruit, which is best for your health?

Which fruit is best to eat on a Paleo diet?

There’s a few ways you can approach the healthiest fruit:

how much sugar does it contain?
how nutritious is it?
how much chemical residue does it contain?

Ideally, you’d only eat those fruits that are low in sugar, high in beneficial nutrients, and low in pesticides and herbicides. Often it’s hard to tick all three boxes, but here’s a short overview to get you heading in the right direction.

Sugar content of popular fruit

Generally speaking, your berries and sour citrus fruits have the lowest fructose content, while things like apples, grapes and mangoes have the most. Probably no great surprise – fruit that makes your face pucker up is generally low in sugar!

Avocado (yup, it’s a fruit!): 1 g sugar/cup
Lime: 1 g sugar/medium
Lemon: 2 g sugar/medium
Raspberries: 5 g sugar/cup
Kiwi: 6 g sugar/medium
Strawberries: 7 g sugar/cup
Grapefruit: 9 g sugar/medium
Watermelon: 9 g sugar/cup
Orange: 13 g sugar/medium
Banana: 14 g sugar/medium
Blueberries: 15 g sugar/cup
Dates: 16 g sugar/medium
Apple: 19 g sugar/medium
Mango: 23 g sugar/cup
Grapes: 23 g sugar/cup
Raisins: 86 g sugar/cup

This is just to give you an idea of which fruits are better than others on the fructose scale. On any given day, you’re better off sticking to berries like raspberries, strawberries, cranberries and blackberries, citrus fruit, and maybe the odd kiwi, plum, or watermelon. Fructose is highly inflammatory, and can contribute to conditions like fatty liver disease and diabetes. Generally the less fructose you consume per day, the better.

How nutritious is your fruit?

This is probably the most difficult aspect of prioritizing your fruit. Different fruits contain different ratios of various nutrients, making direct comparison rather difficult. If you’re suffering from cramps or headaches, you could be lacking in potassium, meaning from a nutrient standpoint a potassium-rich banana might be a good choice. If you’re worried about cancer, however, dark-colored fruits like blueberries or strawberries might be a better choice as they have more antioxidants. It really comes down to what your body is lacking. For fruit-specific nutritional content, you might want to check out this database.

Otherwise, a very committed researcher from William Paterson University ranked 47 fruits and vegetables based on 17 different nutrients considered critical for fighting heart disease and cancer. You can check out their handy ranking system in this article. You’ll notice that there’s far more vegetables on the list than fruit. That’s not a coincidence. I’ve stressed time and again that vegetables should form the backbone of produce in your diet, as they’re generally more nutritionally dense and lower in sugar than most fruit.

Those fruit that did make the nutritional cut are tomato (yep, also a fruit!), lemon, strawberry, orange, lime, grapefruit and blackberry. I’d also be inclined to add avocado to that list – it’s certainly a nutritional powerhouse.

All these fruits also happen to have relatively low sugar content. How convenient!

Is your fruit doused in chemicals?

I’ve written about this very topic in my guide to shopping for fruit and vegetables. Based on comprehensive data compiled by the Environmental Working Group, the Clean 15 and Dirty Dozen lists tell you which produce is best to buy based on potential for chemical residue, and which is worst. Based on their findings, avocados, pineapples, mangoes, papayas, kiwi, honeydew melon, grapefruit and cantaloupe have the lowest risk of chemical pesticide, herbicide or insecticide residue. Unfortunately, lots of your favorite fruits didn’t make the cut, including strawberries, cherries, apples, nectarines, peaches, grapes and tomatoes.

You’ll notice that those fruits which made the Clean 15 all have thick skins which you don’t typically eat. Those that were included in the Dirty Dozen have thin skins that blemish easily and are almost always consumed (except for the oddballs who don’t like apple skin!). With this in mind, I have three recommendations: firstly, always buy organic when you can, as this sidesteps any risk of chemical residue. Secondly, if you can’t buy organic, go for those fruits with the thicker (inedible) skins. And finally, if you must eat your non-organic strawberries and other Dirty Dozen fruit, be sure to give them a good soak first.

Recipe: Paleo fruit salad

Personally, I take great pleasure in eating fruit. It adds a whole lot more flavor and color to my day, so I’m not willing to completely throw in the fructose towel! And when you take into consideration the above factors, there’s no reason why you should give up fruit either.

To rekindle your love of fruit, here’s a great recipe for a Paleo fruit salad I’ve honed over the years. Its filled with fruits that have lower fructose content and higher nutritional value, so it’s not only a tasty treat, but a healthy one too! Just be sure to limit your fruit intake to around 2 servings (a couple of handfuls) per day.

Ingredients:

3 plums, cut into wedges
1 peach, cut into wedges (organic or soaked is best)
1 orange, cut or pulled apart into segments
1/2 cup strawberries, chopped in half (organic or soaked is best)
1/2 cup blackberries
1/2 cup raspberries
1 banana, sliced
3 limes, squeezed
1 sprig mint, finely diced

Instructions:

Using a lemon squeezer or your own trusty hands, squeeze the juice from your 3 limes into a small bowl. Remove the mint leaves from the stem, and dice the leaves relatively finely. Add to the bowl of lime juice, and allow to sit for at least 2 hours so that the mint infuses the lime juice.

Next, cut your plums, peach and oranges into wedges, adding to a large serving bowl. Chop up your banana and throw it in, along with your halved strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries. Peel the orange and add in the segments – if it’s a particularly big orange, you can cut each segment in half to ensure it doesn’t “steal the show”.

When you’re ready to serve, drizzle your lime and mint dressing over the salad, give it a gentle toss to ensure all the fruit is covered and well-mixed, and sprinkle over a garnish of mint leaves if you have any left over. The lime and mint dressing provides a refreshing counterpoint to the sweetness of the other fruits, and has the added benefit of helping to preserve your fruit salad for longer.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Let me know whether you’ve tried the recipe, or if you have your own Paleo-tastic fruit salad to share with the world!

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Posted in Ancestral Nutrition, Real Food Recipes, Uncategorized, Wild Foods & Foraging

Tagged bad, chemicals, eat, EWG, fructose, fruit, fruit salad, good, nutrients, organic, paleo, recipe

How to wash pesticides from fruit and vegetables

Posted on 2 October, 2016 by Will Nicolson | Leave a comment

In a perfect world, you’d only be eating organic produce. Heck, in a perfect world, there’d be no such thing as “non-organic” produce, period. I’ve always found the term “non-organic” a little hard to wrap my head around anyway, seeing as produce is, by definition, organic in nature.

Literary conundrums aside, there’s a bigger dilemma at play here: you can’t always buy organic. It could be the crippling price of organic fruit or vegetables which has you passing them by at high speed, headed for the considerably cheaper chemical-enriched produce aisles. It could also be that your local supermarket simply doesn’t have the incentive or resources to source a good range of organic produce.

Whatever the reason, there’s a good chance that you’ll be munching on a non-organic apple one afternoon, or steaming up some non-organic broccoli for the family dinner one evening. And while you’d be commended for at least eating whole foods in the first place, you’re still ingesting a heady concoction of toxins. These toxins are largely due to pesticides sprayed onto the surface of those fruits and vegetables to protect them from insect and animal attack, and keep them looking blemish-free.

While the reasoning behind such an action is perhaps understandable, the result is not: the chemicals in these pesticides remain in the skin and flesh of the produce, and when ingested they pass into our digestive system and pollute our bodies. The result is a higher risk of developing a wide range of diseases and health conditions, from hormonal imbalance, to neurological disorders and even cancer.

As we recommended in our article on buying the healthiest fruit and vegetables, the logical first step is to turn to the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists. These are an excellent starting point for paleo, primal and simply health-conscious shoppers, as they give an indication of which produce is ok to buy non-organic, and which fruit and veggies you should be prepared to fork out the big bucks for and buy organic. I also just stumbled across this consumer reports guideline, which lists 48 conventional fruits and vegetables available in the US and guides you through which varieties to go for, and which countries have the lowest-risk produce.

But despite all these efforts, you’re probably still going to end up with some non-organic bits and bobs. This is when a good DIY pesticide wash comes in handy. And it doesn’t have to be a super fancy-schmancy thing you buy from some online health food stores for a million bucks. All it takes is some water, vinegar, and a little bit of patience. Doesn’t seem so bad, considering your health is at stake, right?

So, without further ado…

DIY Recipe: Fruit and Vegetable Pesticide Wash

Yum

Easy pesticide and chemical wash

Ingredients

Filtered water (it's ok to substitute tap water if necessary)
Distilled white vinegar

Instructions

Fill a large stainless steel, ceramic or glass bowl with 4 parts water to 1 part white vinegar.
Submerge any fruit, vegetables or other produce that you'd like to clean within the solution. Use a plate or something heavy to keep the items below the water, and leave for 20 minutes.
Take out your fruit or vege, rinse well with tap water, and you're good to go! Simple as that. Make sure you discard your cleaning solution each time.

https://www.thriveprimal.com/how-to-easy-wash-pesticides-fruit-vegetables/

This recipe was created by Liivi Hess, ThrivePrimal.com

You’d think that after dunking your fresh produce in vinegar for 20 minutes, it’d taste pretty strong. But surprisingly, there’s very little hint of vinegar on the food afterwards, and often what vinegary aftertaste does make it through actually complements the native taste of the produce quite nicely.

While you aren’t going to rid your fruit and vegetables of every molecule of pesticide with this vinegar wash, you’ll banish most of it. And in my opinion, less chemicals, no matter how much less, is definitely a good thing.

Your paleo guide to grocery shopping: fruit and vegetables

Posted on 29 July, 2016 by Will Nicolson | Leave a comment

Ok, so you’ve read up on your paleo basics, you’re excited about the positive steps you’re about to take, and you’re rearing to go. You take a bold step inside your local supermarket, and stop abruptly, looking around with a growing sense of unease at the vast shelves of processed goods, overflowing bins of fresh produce, and quivering piles of meat, fish and poultry.

I’ve been there, and I get it. The supermarket for the paleo-conscious is like a minefield, requiring the newly-inducted to step gingerly, lest they put they foot (or in this case, hand) on a food item which appears healthy and wholesome, but is in fact riddled with pesticides and beefed-up on GMOs. Kapow! The bad-food mine goes off in your stomach, you introduce new toxins into your system, and you’re back to square one.

6 years ago, when Liivi and I first jumped on the paleo/primal/Bulletproof bandwagon, we would spend long hours in the supermarket, walking slowly up and down the aisle, examining each potential morsel of food with a metaphorical magnifying glass, and eventually coming to a slow, painstaking decision. We’d get home tired and frustrated, only to find that many of the foods we’d chosen had a sneaky bit of hydrogenated oil or an artificial ingredient that we’d failed to notice in our quest to make it to the checkout with our minds intact.

Gradually, we honed the process, to the point where today we can fly through the supermarket, invariably ignoring 90% of the foods on display, and come out the other side with foods that align with our health mandates. And now I’d like to very generously share that information with you, and save you having to go through the same excruciating process that we did back at the beginning.

This post is the first of a 3-part series which examines how to find the best, cleanest, most paleo-friendly foods at your local supermarket, regardless of how paleo-friendly that supermarket really is. If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s the links to the other articles:

Ratio of fruit to vegetables

Before we delve into how to pick out the healthiest, cleanest fresh produce, it’s worthwhile revisiting one of the key guiding principles of paleo: keep your sugar levels to a minimum, wherever possible.

Now, I’m not talking about removing sugar altogether from your diet: going ketogenic isn’t really my cup of tea. For one thing, sweet things are just so damn delicious, and I’m utterly unwilling to cut them completely out of my life. For another, starving your body of sugar can cause all sorts of hormonal imbalances, the most notable of which is an increase in the production of the stress hormone cortisol, which can in turn contribute to development of auto-immune diseases and annoying conditions like candida.

But, because sugar is pro-inflammatory, and can contribute to weight gain and a host of other ailments and diseases when consumed in excess, you definitely need to keep an eye on it. Fruit, as it happens, is high in fructose, a type of sugar that can spike your blood sugar levels and increase your risk of insulin resistance, which in turn can lead to diabetes.

For this reason, you should always buy far more vegetables than fruit. Vegetables have all the nutritional benefits of fruit, but without the sugar (with the exception of high-starch vegetables like potatoes), so go nuts in the vegetable department. As for fruit, I find eating between 1 and 3 portions per day is just the ticket – make sure you vary what varieties you eat on a daily and weekly basis, though.

Going organic

In a perfect world, you’d always buy organic produce. Heck, you’d buy organic everything if you could. But, unless you shop solely at an amazing farmer’s market which permits only organic meat and produce (if you know of such a place, I want to hear about it!!), that’s not really an option. Organic produce is grown and harvested without the use of pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, meaning that it is higher in nutrients and doesn’t introduce nasty toxins into your body.

But organic produce is expensive, and it’s generally only available for limited varieties in your supermarket (if at all). For this reason, you need to prioritize what you buy organic, and what you don’t. Luckily, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has already done this for us, producing two lists called the Clean Fifteen and the Dirty Dozen which indicate which foods are better to be bought organic, and which foods are low enough in toxins etc that they can be bought non-organic without too many health concerns. The lists are as follows.

Green Fifteen (generally less prone to toxic sprays and chemical fertilizers, so ok to eat non-organic):

avocados
sweet corn (I wouldn’t advise eating this AT ALL, if you can avoid it)
pineapples
cabbage
frozen sweet peas
onions
asparagus
mangos
papayas
kiwi
eggplant
honeydew melon
grapefruit
cantaloupe
cauliflower

Dirty Dozen (generally more likely to be coated in chemicals, so better to buy organic):

strawberries
apples
nectarines
peaches
celery
grapes
cherries
spinach
tomatoes
sweet bell peppers
cherry tomatoes
cucumbers
hot peppers
kale and collard greens

If you look at the two lists, you can see a bit of a theme emerging – produce with a thick outer skin that you don’t traditionally eat, like grapefruit, onions, and avocados, is less prone to chemical treatment. Produce which is eaten whole, without anything being removed (like strawberries and apples), is more likely to be sprayed in order to keep its surface blemish-free. The same applies to leafy greens.

With this in mind, you can formulate a very rough guide to shopping for organic produce:

DO buy organic: leafy greens and any fruit and veggies without a thick outer skin (includes tomatoes and peppers)
NOT NECESSARY to buy organic: fruit and vegetables with thick, inedible skins, or skins which you remove anyway before cooking or eating. Things which grow underground, like potatoes and sweet potatoes, are generally ok to eat non-organic, but it’s often better to peel them before cooking to remove potential fungicides.

GMO produce

Generally, most foods which are organic are also GMO-free, however this isn’t always the case. According to GMO Awareness, with USDA Organic-labelled products, “at least 95 percent of content is organic by weight (excluding water and salt). The <5% remaining ingredients must consist of substances approved on the USDA’s National List. GMOs are NOT on this list, so USDA Organic products are also usually GMO-free.”

It sounds as weird to me as it does to you, but there it is. Despite that rather confusing revelation, USDA organic remains one of the best ways to buy GMO-free (or mostly GMO-free) produce. Luckily, however, we’re starting to see many products and produce with the “NON GMO Project VERIFIED” label, which tells you that your fruit or veggies are completely free of genetically modified organisms.

Which produce is best?

We all have different tastes, and I don’t want to be the one to dictate what you should and shouldn’t buy, but not all fruits and vegetables are created equal. Here’s a list of “paleo-approved” produce, adjusted slightly to allow some primal diet goodness into the mix. Things like avocados, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and pumpkin are technically fruit, but I’ve included them here as most people think of them as vegetables.

The bottom two rows are red because these vegetables are high in starches, which means that you need to moderate the amount you eat of these each day. As a rough guide, limit your consumption of starchy vegetables to a handful per day.

Within the “approved” fruit category, there are those varieties which are better than others, and these largely consist of berries. Because they have a preposterously high nutrient content and relatively low sugar content, they should always go to the top of your fruit shopping list. I have a love affair with raspberries and have often been heard to proclaim that they are the “king of fruit”. Turns out I was right! Well, more like the oligarch of fruit, but I’ll call that a win!

That’s about it! The above should provide a solid basis for you to become a produce-shopping superstar, saving you some serious time and preventing some major paleo setbacks.

If you’re really serious about taking your diet to the next level, our ebook The Paleo Guide to Beating Candida Naturally has a comprehensive, detailed section on what you should and shouldn’t eat, and even more on shopping for the right stuff. Even if you don’t have Candida (chances are, you probably do), it’s an invaluable guide.