Five a day? Perhaps not such a good idea.

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If ever there was an example of a guy doing all the right things and still ending up dead anyway it is fruitarian Steve Jobs.

The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Treatment Centre in New York is the number one cancer treatment and research hospital in the USA, so it’s probably fair to say there’s nowhere better. The president of that establishment is cell biologist Craig B. Thompson. He says if you over eat fat you don’t increase your chances of developing cancer at all. If you over eat protein you increase your chances of developing cancer. But if you over eat carbohydrates (as most of us do) you dramatically increase your chances of cancer. The bottom line is fruits are just sugars (mostly) that raise your risk for metabolic disease if you eat too much of them. Now indeed some are way better than others, but to base your diet on them seems a little reckless. Until about 50 years ago, we never ate fruit unless it was available, as it was, in small quantities for a few weeks of the year. We ate that way for hundreds of thousands of years. Now we eat it every day of the year.

The simple fact is fat cells have insulin receptors, so eating carbs and raising insulin provides the mechanism for the glucose to get into the cell. But cancer cells also have insulin receptors, this is how they grow (with oxygen also). Fat doesn’t raise insulin therefore no free feeds for cancer. Steve Jobs diet almost certainly contributed to his death.

Bananas grow all year round, but those people with problems – westernised people especially, have not been exposed to year-round fruit bonanzas until recently. There are human tools going back in these islands nearly a million years, what did they eat on the long dark cold winter days? Not fruit.

The same is true for many other parts of the world, certainly (I’d conclude) the part where the sick folk originate from. Who knows how long it takes to adapt to a diet.

Rice has been in the Asian diet starting about 13,000 years ago, but we’ve been eating it for hundreds of years probably at most. Perhaps this explains why Asians can eat it in great quantities and not get fat and sick. Perhaps their non-exposure to dairy explains their intolerance and our long exposure to it explains our tolerance? Anyway, my point was that in a great deal of this world we’ve not been eating fruit in anything like the quantities we are eating it now.

As for this:

fruit juice is only mildly better than coke imo

I tend to agree, but it is interesting that a 2007 study on the cancer that Jobs died from noted:

A significant association [with pancreatic cancer] was found with fruit and juices intake but not with soda intake.

From a study published in 2007 in The Amercian Journal of Clinical Nutriton.

So you might actually be better of with a coke!