A whole fruit/pieces of fruit are better than fruit juices. Fruit juices by their creation concentrate the amount of sugar per ounce, compared to whole fruit.
There’s a book I read that totally changed the way I thought about food, called “Don’t Eat For Winter”....
Our bodies evolved over millions of years to work in perfect balance with the foods produced seasonally by nature. However, this equilibrium has recently been unhinged as a result of our ingenious ability to farm, store, preserve and transport food. Nowadays, seasonal foods are available all year round, and because the natural feast/famine cycle that nature enforced on us has been broken, many people are perpetually gaining weight. To combat this, they end up going on restrictive, torturous diet and exercise regimes to simulate periods of shortage and hardship in order to battle the bulge. In many cases, this ends up in frustration and a rebound occurs where the person ends up back where they started, or worse.
What many fail to realise is that carbs stimulate responses in the brain and body conducive to weight gain. Our primal gorge instincts and reward centres are invoked through the release of dopamine, causing addiction like behaviour, and our cells open up and go into storage mode to receive nutrients (including fat) through insulin response. Other effects, such as lethargy can also be induced, including the post-lunch dip, also promoting fat storage through decreased activity.
Cian Foley, author of Don’t Eat for Winter, argues the case that carbs are the trigger for autumn fat storage. “In countries with pronounced seasons, carbs typically only exist in late summer and autumn. It stands to reason that these high sugar/starch foods trigger primal processes in our brains/bodies that promote fat storage in order to help us survive the shortages and cold of winter. After graphing an array of natural foods by their optimal harvest month, I noticed a huge spike in high gi/gl foods occurring in Autumn time. Stone-age people would have used this food, along with the staples (protein and fat) to store excess energy and nutrients in order to survive the oncoming season: Winter; just like other animals that work symbiotically with their natural ecosystems.”
We are now living in an infinite autumn, with all of natures autumnal produce available at all times, and typically societies across the globe eat them with every single meal. This means we are constantly eating foods that are preparing our bodies for a phantom winter. So the simple message of the book is this: Don’t Eat for Winter through moderating foods with the autumnal macro-nutrient signature (the Squirrel Formula) and see what happens.
The fiber is lacking in juice as well.