There are alarmed people because fruits are increasingly sweet. It is a more complicated phenomenon than it appears

A few years ago, Melbourne Zoo decided that he would stop giving fruits to some of his animals “because they were too sweet for their own good“In recent years, red pandas and primates had gained weight and some even had signs of decay.

The reason tells a greater story about our relationship with the fruit.

Too much sugar. “The problem is that cultivated fruits have been genetically modified to have a sugar content much greater than its natural ancestral fruits,” Michael Lynch explainedVeterinarian Chief of the Zoo, to the Sydney Morning Herald.

It seemed a curiosity without much route, but it wasn’t. The idea that “fruit is not healthy because it has much higher sugar levels than in the old days” It has been circulating for years Online. In fact, come back again and again … But is it?

The answer is complicated. If we go to the data (for example, to Central fooddataa database of nutritional analysis of food in the US), we can find some fruits in which that is seen growth. For example, “wild blueberries” would have 6.46% of sugars, while commercial “blueberries” would be at 9.96%.

Growth is considerable, yes. What happens is that this effect disappears when, instead of comparing with primitive varieties, we analyze whether the fruit has been raising its amounts of sugars in recent decades. Angela Dowden He reviewed the United Kingdom data since 1946 and found no significant differences in the sugar content of apples, white grapes or strawberries.

Giovanni Stanchi.

This makes sense. For years, human beings have gone improving Fruits and vegetables to the point that they don’t look at anything. Giovanni Stanchi was an Italian still life of the seventeenth century. At some point between 1645 and 1672, Stanchi painted a picture full of peaches, pears and watermelons. Watermelons that do not look anything like ours.

And it’s not that it was anything new. The watermelon was a plant of Africa that for 1600 (via al-Andalus) It was already extremely popular in the orchards throughout Europe. Bodegons give us An unbeatable opportunity To see how the watermelon has changed until today. By 1860, the watermelons They were acquiring an appearance more recognizable.

It is not just a matter of appearance. Also of flavor. We have seen it With tomatoes (Although, in this case, Often for worse) and we could see it with almost all fruits and vegetables. For example, Brussels cabbage They are much less bitter That 20 years ago.

The point is that, when we talk about sugars in fruits, we will see that growth has a limit. A physical limit. In general, As the botanist James to Wong explainedfruity sugars levels tend to converge in a very similar range because, as with tomatoesplants can not manufacture more sugar without becoming much larger or produced less (and none of that interests us at a commercial level).

But there is something else. Let’s go to nutritional data to see it clearly: following Dowden’s data, super sweet “modern” strawberries contain only 4.89% of sugars, while Kiwis have 8.99% and bananas have 12.23%. This gives us an interesting key. As Wong points out, what fitomejoradores do is that “the fruit has a sweeter flavor not increasing sugars, but reducing acid and bitter chemicals that mask their sweetness.”

And there is the explanation of what happened with Melbourne’s animals. The problem was not so much the level of fruits sugars (which, Rememberbeing “fiber -packaged fructose” cannot increase blood sugar levels as refined sugars), but were so good that pandas and primates stopped eating other things and their diet was unbalanced.

It does not seem a problem that affects us human beings. Hopefully the fruit would gain weight in our diet because that would mean that, on average, the feeding of society would improve. What we are seeing is, in fact, it is just the opposite: the weight in our processed food diet tripled between 1990 and 2010 (from 11% to 31.7%) and that led to the added sugars added will pass from 8.4% of our daily energy intake at 13%.

Within our dietary concerns, the sweet fruit is not among the worst problems.

Image | Evie Fjord

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