- Are you eating the wrong fruit?
- The apple that raises cholesterol
- Why your broccoli is more complicated than you think
I’ve got a lot to unpack today.
So buckle up for some startling revelations.
Including: why apples can be bad for you…why broccoli isn’t real… and why the Neolithic people are to blame for our health woes.
Yes, indeed.
And it all begins with this…
Pip-free superfruits being bred to hit the sweet spot
I saw the above headline in the Sunday Times last month and thought:
“Hmmmmm…”
The article was about a new generation of “superfruits”, bred to be sweeter, juicier, pip-free and even shrunken to snack size for convenience.
Not only that, Waitrose is launching a “tearless onion” (known as a ‘sunion’) and there are plans afoot to sell seedless lemons in Tesco.
You might think this is good news.
After all, there are people who don’t like a lot of fruit and veg because it’s too sour, or bitter, or pungent or awkward to eat.
So getting them to eat more nutritious whole food can only be a good thing, right?
Well, I’m going to have to be a right old party pooper here and say…
No, I don’t think so.
And I’m going to explain why…
Why the Neolithic period has a lot to answer for
The first thing to point out is that the new superfruits and vegetables mentioned in the article are not genetically engineered.
So don’t worry on that front.
Their creators are simply using age-old techniques of selection and breeding.
And it’s important to remember that pretty much ALL the fruit and veg we take for granted has been developed this way.
For example, tenderstem broccoli – which is everywhere in the supermarkets these days – is a hybrid of broccoli and Chinese kale, created in the 1990s for its long, edible stalk.
But ‘traditional’ broccoli is a human creation too.
It was bred by the Romans in 600BC from the wild cabbage plant, Brassica oleracea, so that its flavour and texture became more palatable.
This process goes back to the Neolithic period, around 5000 BCE, when farming took hold around the globe.
It was at that point that many wild plants became cultivated and bred into the forms we recognise today.
For instance, the tomato was a berry that grew in the Andes… bananas were originally full of massive hard seeds with dry flesh and leathery skins… and carrots were originally scraggy little purple roots found in Afghanistan.
They were domesticated by the first farmers, who selected the ones that were easiest and fastest to grow larger and fleshier. The more popular of them spread from these origins as people migrated and traded.
So the new breed of superfruits described in the Sunday Times are just the latest stage of this ancient process.
Therefore it’s not really ‘modern farming methods’ at work here, but Neolithic ones, going back before the Bronze Age.
However, here lies the problem.
When fruit and veg stop being good for you
This process of breeding and selecting has given us some wonderful food.
Squidgy bananas… tangy tomatoes… sweet and crunchy apples… juicy oranges…
But this has come at a cost to our health.
Because over thousands of years, we have stripped away many of the nutrients in those wild plants, making the new incarnations far less good for us.
There’s a brilliant book about this topic by Jo Robinson, called Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health.
She points out that:
- The wild plant known as purslane has six times more vitamin E than spinach and fourteen times more omega-3 fatty acids.
- One species of wild tomato has fifteen times more lycopene than the typical supermarket tomato.
- The native potatoes that grow in the Andes have twenty-eight times more phytonutrients than russet potatoes.
- One species of wild apple in Nepal has one hundred times more bionutrients than our most popular apples.
Robinson believes that the vitamin supplementation industry now exists purely because we lack the essential vitamins and minerals we need.
But if we were still eating wild plants, she writes, there would be no need for these supplements at all.
What’s more, our drive to make fruit and veg more sweet and palatable could be making the situation far worse.
She gives readers one shocking example of this.
The apple that raises cholesterol
In 2009, forty-six overweight men with high cholesterol took part in a study – half eating their usual diet and half adding a Golden Delicious apple every day.
When tested after two months, the apple eating group had HIGHER levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol, therefore increasing their risk of heart attack and stroke.
It turns out that the Golden Delicious – one of America’s most popular apples – was too low in phytonutrients to lower the men’s cholesterol and so high in sugar that it raised their triglycerides.
She says the universal health advice to eat more fruit and veg should be changed to advice on which specific ones to eat.
And it’s not always older is better – Golden Delicious being a hundred-year old variety, has fewer antioxidants than the Liberty apply, which is only twenty-five years old.
It’s often the case that the more sour, pungent and unappealing fruits and veg tend to contain more nutrients.
So the reason I am sceptical of the new food innovations trumpeted in the Sunday Times last month is not because of the artificial process of developing them… but because it’s likely to be reducing their health benefits even further.
At this rate, we might end up with fruit and veg that EVERYBODY loves…
But will they do us any good?