Let fruit be fruit - not candy - LA Times

Let fruit be fruit - not candy - LA Times

Eat more fruits and vegetables! We all know we should do it. Food companies, mindful of the fact that most of us would prefer to eat candy, sometimes seem bent on turning fruit into just that.

Today --in just the latest of many similar announcements -- we received a release about "a delicious, natural line of wholesome freeze-dried fruit snacks that are "made with only the finest freeze-dried apples and strawberries – with just a hint of pure, natural sugar." (Added sugar seems close to achieving sainthood status these days.) We checked out the product, FruitziO. Each serving comes in a resealable bag -- which seems unnecessary, given that the entire snack is 25 grams (less than 1 ounce) in weight. That 25-gram serving contains 100 calories and 19 grams of sugar (you can't tell how many of those are added). You get 2 grams of dietary fiber.

By comparison, a medium sized apple, at about 180 grams -- more than seven times the bulk of the snack -- is also 100 calories, according to the USDA. It contains twice as much fiber as the snack and the same tally of sugars, none of which are added. The snack contains more vitamin C than the apple -- 58% of a person's recommended Daily Value compared with the 14% listed for an apple.

Freeze-drying and concentrating fruit products seem to sidestep many of the benefits of eating fruit. We're are not talking missions to Mars, here, where every last ounce of weight adds a kajillion dollars to NASA's budget. The good thing about the apple, in addition to the fiber, is: 1) the time it takes to eat it, 2) the other things we don't eat when we're eating it, and 3) the satiating power that comes from its bulk and 4) the lack of density of calories.

Barbara Rolls, a professor of nutrition at Penn State, wrote a whole book (Volumetrics) about the influence of calorie density on how many calories we eat. Right near the beginning of the book she notes that 1/4 cup raisins contains the same number of calories as two cups of grapes. "Which," she asks (and we sense she asks this rhetorically), "is likely to fill you up more?"

How many freeze-dried snacks could we snarf down -- feeling ever-so-virtuous all the time we were doing it, because, after all, we are eating fruit -- in the same time it takes to crunch through an apple?

Rosie Mestel