 What happens if you only eat fruit for 30 days? Well, to tell you the truth, not only would you gain a ton of weight, you would absolutely destroy your health. The truth is the main purpose of fruit is to help us put on weight. Yes, you heard that right. It turns out we have a genetic mutation that we inherited from great apes that allows great apes and us to take fruit, particularly the fructose in fruit, and turn it into fat in the form of triglycerides. And there are entire books written about the fact that great apes only gain weight during fruit season. And contrary to popular belief, fruit only ripens once a year, even in the jungle. And that fruit season happens right before the winter, which even in the jungle is a time of less food and certainly less fruit. That genetic mutation to use fruit as a way of putting on weight, we inherited from our great apes cousins. That means that fructose is the best way to produce weight gain primarily by, get this, destroying your mitochondria's ability to make energy. So fructose consumption is so bad for you that papers in humans and in animals show that fructose consumption inhibits gasotransmitter production. Now you're going, wait a minute, what the heck does a gasotransmitter have to do with anything? If you've read the Energy Paradox on Unlocking the Keto Code, my last two books, you know that gasotransmitters are gases that actually communicate information to our mitochondria, to our cells. These gases dilate blood vessels, these gases make mitochondria work properly, and they're actually essential to our health. And yet fructose consumption stops the production of gasotransmitters, which is, believe it or not, a really bad thing. A recent paper showed that fructose consumption rather than glucose consumption was the main cause of fatty liver disease. And if you haven't heard of it by now, we are plagued with fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis is the fancy name for it. But many people have heard of the word foie gras. Foie gras is goose or duck liver that has become fatty by feeding ducks and geese healthy whole grains and fruits. In fact, some foie gras is produced by feeding stuffing geese with figs, and they make so much fructose that they produce fatty liver disease. It also causes hyperuricemia. What's hyperuricemia? Hyperuricemia is high uric acid. Uric acid is a detoxification product of fructose. Fructose kills mitochondria. Fructose kills kidney cells. So we try to detoxify it, and one of those toxins is uric acid. If any of you have ever had gout, if any of you have had uric acid kidney stones, that's from uric acid. And one of the biggest drivers of uric acid production is fruit consumption. Finally, we now know that people who eat a lot of fruit because of their high uric acid production develop high blood pressure just from the uric acid from fruit consumption. So why in the world would you want to do any of those things? And you've heard me say it over and over again, give fruit the boot. But you don't have to give up fruit altogether. I have three simple rules for consuming fruit. First of all, stick to low sugar fruits. Really, one of the best ones that's available year round is a kiwi fruit. And please don't cut the peel off. The peel has some of the best polyphenols that you can find. And kiwis are actually loaded with fiber, and they really have some of the lowest glycemic index of any of the fruits. Second, berries. Believe it or not, raspberries and blackberries are actually lower in sugar content than strawberries or blueberries. Now, part of the reason is, particularly strawberries and blueberries have been bred for sugar content. And you'll notice that particularly strawberries and blueberries are now huge compared to what they used to be. And that's because of the sugar content has been increased because you'll eat more of them. Stick with blackberries and raspberries. Finally, pomegranate seeds. Pomegranate seeds with the seed are great sources of some of the best polyphenols money can buy. Don't buy pomegranate juice. That's just drinking fructose. Sorry about that. Buy the seeds and eat them. Throw them in your salads. Throw them in your yogurt. Eat them by a handful. However you want to get them, those are the safest fruits. But remember, just consume fruit in moderation. Use it as an additive to something you're already planning to eat, like a yogurt, like a salad. That way it's really very difficult to overdo fruit consumption. And just act like a great egg. It's only available normally once a year. If it's coming from somewhere else, like Argentina, like Chile, like Mexico, like Central America, it is officially out of season here in America. And please don't buy it and eat it. How about some of the worst fruits? Well, the idea that an apple a day keeps the doctor away might have been true 100 years ago when apples were small and bitter. Now, of course, apples have been bread for sugar content, for fructose content. And even the names give them away. Honeycrisp, ambrosia, come on. They're now the size of a small cantaloupe rather than what they were before. And believe it or not, the best part of an apple is actually the peel. The problem is that almost all peels have been treated with pesticides and preservatives that make them really unacceptable. If you can find a small organic apple in season from a farmer, that's your safest bet. But remember, a current apple has more sugar than a candy bar. And I can tell you what you'd probably rather have. Ripe bananas, believe it or not, a ripe banana has 15 grams of sugar. Yep, sugar. You don't have to give up bananas if you love them, but please eat them green. Now, what means green? It should be difficult to get the peel off of a green banana. And if you actually have to peel it with a knife, that's the best definition of a green banana. Now, a lot of people don't like the taste of green bananas. I get it. Freeze them and put them in a smoothie with some of your favorite greens, some of your raspberries and blackberries. And that's a great way to enjoy a banana. How about grapes? Everybody knows that grapes have resveratrol. Well, sorry people, grapes are some of the worst fruits out there. One cup of grapes has two times the amount of sugar as a Hershey's candy bar. These things are, in fact, nature's candy. There's very little fiber in modern grapes. And remember, the benefits of grapes have always been in the seeds and the skin. And I'm old enough to remember when grapes were actually only available with seeds. They're still available in Japan and parts of Europe with seeds. And I got news for you, people eat the entire thing because the grape seed and the skin are really the only beneficial parts of the grape. There are other fruits that deserve your attention. An avocado is actually a single-seeded berry. And so, even though it's a fruit, please feel free to have an avocado. An avocado a day definitely keeps the doctors away. There are other interesting fruits that are beginning to show up in farmers markets. Mall berries have some of the greatest polyphenol content that you could find. Same with boysenberries, a cousin of blackberries. A crispy pear. Now, a crispy pear are those hard pears that you see, particularly in the fall. They have various different names. Danju pear is one of them. If they're crispy, that means the sugar content is quite low. They're really great to add interest to your salads. That's actually how I use them. And remember pomegranate. There's also a very cool omega-5 fat in pomegranate seeds that deserve your attention. All right, remember, fruits picked out of season and flown here. Number one, don't have the benefits you're looking for. And as I've written about in the plant paradox, if the fruit is picked unripe, the fruit normally has a lot of lectins in it to dissuade you from eating it. Only when it ripens on the plant are the lectins destabilized and killed by the mother plant itself. But when you pick fruit unripe, fly it here to the United States and then use gas, ethylene oxide, to fake ripen it, those changes don't occur. And so eating fruit from somewhere else is doubly bad. The sugar content of sky high compared to old days. And in the old days, the only way to have fruit was to have it locally picked. So give fruit the boot, but if you're gonna have it, stay in season and use low sugar fruits as your first choice. This next one is sure to surprise you. 95% of human beings have a preformed antibody to the peanut lectin.