I want to lose weight: Should I eat fruit?

I've been getting this question a lot lately, so I decided to write a quick post about it. While it's true that fruits are a great source of fiber and nutrients, they are also a source of sugar. Anytime you hear "ose" on the end of a word (fructose, dextrose, sucrose) you should immediately think the of the S word: Sugar! Fructose is the sugar contained in fruits. And while it is a natural sugar, it's still sugar. In fact, sugar itself is natural. It's a whole, real food. That doesn't mean you should eat it! 

But you just said fruit was loaded with nutrients and fiber! There are no nutrients in fruit that you can't get from vegetables, so if your goal is significant weight loss, replace your fruits with vegetables. Because most people reach for fruit in the morning, a simple solution is to make extra vegetables for dinner the night before (roasted broccoli or cauliflower are my favorites) so you can easily reheat them in the morning with your proteins. Not only will you get all of the nutrients and fiber you're after, you'll also feel satiated much longer from the vegetables than you would if you had chosen to eat a fruit salad with your egg. 

And as Gary Taubes asserts in "Why We Get Fat," What makes fruit worrisome from the perspective of Adiposity 101 is that it is sweet to the taste precisely because it contains a type of sugar known as fructose, and fructose is uniquely fattening as carbohydrates go. As nutritionists and public-health authorities have become increasingly desperate in their attempts to rein in the obesity epidemic, they've also become increasingly strident in their suggestions that we eat copious fruit along with green vegetables. Fruit doesn't have to be processed before we eat it: it's fat- and cholesterol-free; it has vitamins and antioxidants; and so, by this logic, must be good for us. Maybe so. But if we're predisposed to put weight on, it's a good bet that most fruit will make the problem worse, not better" (p 136).

The bottom line is this: if you want to lose weight, greatly reduce your sugar intake, including fruits. If you want to eat fruit, stick to the low-glycemic varieties, such as berries and apples, and try to save eating them for when you want dessert or are craving something sweet.