Food Freedom Friday Edition 342 - What About Fruit?
Fruits are definitely not a carnivore food but they did play a role in the diet of ancient man, even if somewhat small of a role. You may wonder if there any benefits in adding fruits to your carnivore-type diet?
In my experience, for some people, adding a small amount of fruits to a predominantly meat-based diet can be beneficial BUT, fruits are not a good fit for everyone, for some people, fruits should definitely be avoided.
Benefits Of Adding Fruit
Meeting Nutrient Needs
Although a carnivore diet can definitely provide you with all the nutrients that your body needs, for some people, adding a small amount of fruit can make it easier to meet their nutritional requirements.
Vitamin C is a good example. While vitamin C can be found in abundance in many fruits and vegetables, it is lower in animal-sourced foods. A 100-gram serving of grain-fed beef has only 1.6 mg of vitamin C, whereas a 100-gram serving of oranges has 53 mg of vitamin C
On a carnivore diet, your vitamin C requirement is lower than that on an omnivore diet (due to the negligible amount of carbohydrate intake), you can still get enough vitamin C to prevent scurvy by eating nose-to-tail and by not overcooking your meat.
However, for those who don’t eat organ meat or enjoy their meat well-cooked, having a serving of fruits a day can help boost vitamin C intake significantly.
The best source of folate on the carnivore diet is liver (beef, lamb, pork or chicken liver) and eggs while muscle meat has very little folate. Therefore, if you don’t incorporate organ meat into your diet regularly, adding fruits to your diet occasionally can help.
Some fruits like avocadoes, oranges, papayas, strawberries, blackberries, and bananas are good sources of folate.
Supporting Metabolic Flexibility
If you follow a strict carnivore diet for a long period of time, you will likely not feel very well if you suddenly have to eat some fruits or vegetables to survive.
However, if you add a small amount of seasonal fruits and vegetables to your diet a few times a week, your metabolic flexibility will be maintained.
If you suddenly have to rely on mostly plant food to survive, you’ll fare much better than those who have always been on a strict carnivore diet. Your ability to eat plant food without falling sick can be your survival advantage.
Antinutrients Can Provide Beneficial Dietary Acute Stressors
A small quantity of fruits can expose your body to an acute stressor in the form of plant anti-nutrients.
When you consume plant-based foods, anti-nutrients present in those foods cause inflammation in the body. In response, the body produces its own antioxidant called glutathione to reduce inflammation.
Over time, your body will adapt to those hormetic stressors and become stronger.
Of course, if consumed too much and too often, plant anti-nutrient will become a form of chronic stress instead.
Fruit Is An Ancestral Food
There is no doubt that early humans thrived on a heavily meat-based diet and the human body today is still suited to a meat-based diet.
However, there is no evidence that they were eating meat exclusively. While it is unclear to what extent plant food had featured in ancient man’s diet, given the fact that they descended from plant-eating primates, they most likely ate some plant food in the wild between successful hunts in order to survive.
Some people even argue that animal-sourced food plus fruits and honey is the ultimate best combination. For people who are metabolically healthy, this may well be true, but for others, this is not an option.
Why Avoid Fruit
Fruit Intolerance
Some people respond poorly to even small amounts of fruits. This is not surprising because although fruits are nutritious, they are also high in ant-nutrients or natural pesticides.
For example, some berries which are low in sugar and are believed to be low toxin fruits can be high in oxalates. These include raspberries, elderberries and black currants are very high in oxalates. Most fruits contain considerable amounts of salicylate.
Oxalates or oxalate acids are anti-nutrients that plants produce to protect themselves. Once consumed, oxalate binds with calcium and other minerals to form oxalate crystals, the main ingredient in kidney stones. Oxalate crystals can cause damages to the eyes, immune system, neurological system, GI tract, and connective tissues.
Similarly, salicylate is another compound that plants produce to protect themselves. People who are sensitive to salicylate can suffer from a number of serious symptoms including headaches, migraines, respiratory irritation, gastrointestinal discomfort, irritability, joint pain, swelling and fluid retention, mouth ulcers, sore and itchy eyes.
Chronic Conditions
If you start the carnivore diet in the hope of fixing some underlying health problems, it’s best to stick to a strict version of the carnivore diet of only ruminant meat, fat and organs.
To support healing, you need the most nutrient-dense food and the best quality food possible. Ruminant meat, fat and organs meet these criteria.
To support healing, you also want to eliminate or minimize your toxin intake whether it’s from fruits, vegetables or from your environment.
The ICMNI, a centre in Hungary, has been using a high-fat animal-based diet since 2012 to treat many chronic conditions including diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cancer and intestinal permeability.
They provide these recommendations to fruit and vegetable consumption:
· If you have conditions like intestinal permeability or autoimmune diseases, you need to be on a strict high-fat animal-based diet with no plant food allowed
· A high fat animal based diet works best without the consumption of fruits and vegetables
· If you are a generally healthy person with a simple health problem such as obesity or diabetes, fruits and vegetables may be allowed depending on your conditions, but they should be well sourced.
· Fruits and vegetables should not exceed 30% of a meal (in volume)
· Fruits should be low in sugar content in order to maintain ketosis status.
However, once your health problems are resolved, there is no reason why you can’t test out and re-introduce fruits to your diet again if you wish.
Weight Loss
If you are trying to lose weight, it may not be a good idea to add fruits to your diet.
To lose weight, you want your body to dig into the fat storage and burn it off for fuel, i.e. staying in ketosis.
Because fruits these days are all bigger and sweeter compared to those available during our ancestors’ time, there is a risk that you would consume too much and get out of ketosis.
Of course, if you enjoy fruits, you can try adding them to your diet and see if they have any impact on your weight loss progress.
How To Add Fruit
Most fruits available today did not exist pre-agriculture, and ancient man did not have access to the variety of fruit eaten today.
If you would like to add fruits to your diet, the best practices are:
Consume Seasonally
Before the advent of agriculture, the only fruits available were seasonal and available rarely unless one was living in the tropics.
Therefore, if you want to add fruits to your diet, try to eat with seasons.
Eating with seasons also allows your body the time to deal with plant toxins from that particular seasonal fruit before getting exposure to other kinds of plant toxins.
There is a theory that fruits are the only part of plants that are meant to be eaten as plants want to spread their seeds far from their sources. For better survival theyhave developed a way to communicate with animals via vibrant colors, fragrances, and tastes of the fruits. This has never been proven and doesn’t explain why so many colorful and inviting fruits are poisonous to humans and some animals.
However, no matter how good their self-defense mechanisms are, some animal species have evolved and adapted over a very long course of the evolutionary process and are able to eat those fruits without health consequences.
It is important to note that even the fruits considered least toxic like berries and avocados still have compounds that cause health problems in some people and animals.
Eating seasonally can be challenging given the abundance of fruits available all year round in grocery stores thanks to better preservation means and global trade.
An alternative could be to make a long list of fruits that you like to eat and rotate through them instead of eating a favorite fruit all the time.
Eat In Limited Quantities
Thanks to thousands of years of selective breeding, fruits today are all bigger, juicier, and a lot sweeter compared to what ancient man used to eat pre-agriculture.
As a result, like any food that is high in sugar, it is very easy to overeat fruit. Eating too much fruit will spike your blood sugar, may kick you out of ketosis as well as sabotage your weight loss progress. If you make fruit a part of your diet, it is advisable to not eat as much fruit as you like.
It’s better to set some limit like three or four servings a week or one to two servings a day depending on how physically active you are and your health conditions.
Some people argue that if your ancestors lived near the equator in the tropical climate, you might be able to handle a bit more fruits and carbs in general. On an individual level it would be best to test it out with different quantities of fruits to see how you feel.
In addition, to help limit consumption, eat whole fresh fruits and avoid fruit juices, fruit smoothies and dried fruits which are especially high in sugar.
Choose Organic
Conventional fruits are heavily sprayed with chemicals. If you can’t afford organic produce, please try to avoid the most sprayed fruits in the list below or have them very sparingly.
Refer to the Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce, below are the most heavily sprayed fruits
Opt For Low Sugar Fruit
As previously mentioned, due to selective breeding by farmers over thousands of years as well as genetic engineering, fruits these days are all bigger, juicier, and a lot sweeter.
Unless you are metabolically healthy, physically active and work out a lot, it’s best to stay with low sugar fruits.
Some fruits such as bananas, mangoes, cherries and litchis are especially high in sugar so you either need to be mindful of your intake or avoid them.
Conclusion
If you are generally healthy, it’s might be okay to add fruits to your meat-based diet.
If you have some health issues that you are trying to fix with the carnivore diet, avoid all fruits until your health problems are completely resolved.
You can test fruits for intolerance afterward and add them back to your diet as you see fit however, if you choose to add fruits to your diet, eat organic and seasonal fruits in small quantities.
If you have space in your backyard, growing a mini orchard would be the best way to ensure you truly eat organic, seasonal and local.