fruits that cause weight loss? Well, it’s true and the benefits are not small! Juicy fruits have a ton of nutrients and can help you with smooth bowel movements and much more. Here is the list of the best 5 types of fruits for easy weight loss. All Fruit is good fruit but there are few fruits that cause weight loss and can help you lose fat fast, promoting optimal body composition.
Will Dried Fruit Cause Weight Gain?
Your weight and health depend on many factors, from your genetics to your activity levels, so you can’t count on one food to make or break your weight loss plan. Dried fruit tends to be higher in calories than its fresh counterparts, which might make it more likely to trigger weight gain, but you won’t gain weight if you don’t eat more calories than you burn. If you control portion size, dried fruit supplies nutrients that might actually help you lose weight.
Dried Fruit, Calories and Weight Gain
The balance between how many calories you eat versus how many calories you burn affects your weight — regularly eating too many calories causes weight gain, while eating slightly less than you need promotes weight loss.
Dried fruit can fit into virtually any diet, whether calorie-restricted for weight loss or one designed for weight maintenance or weight gain. However, because dried fruit shrinks during the dehydration process as the water is removed, it’s significantly higher in calories by volume than fresh fruit. For example, while a grape and a raisin contain comparable calories, a cup of raisins has more pieces of fruit than a cup of grapes, so it contains more calories — about 400, compared to 100 calories in a cup of grapes. Dried apples and apricots are also more calorie-dense than their fresh counterparts, providing about 4 times as many calories per 1-cup serving.
If you’re trying to gain pounds, adding lots of dried fruit can be helpful because you can easily take in extra calories per serving, but this can slow loss if your dieting to lose weight. Always measure your portion size; if you accidentally serve more than you intend, those extra calories can add up quickly.
Evidence for Dried Fruit and Weight Loss
While dried fruits’ high calorie content could stall your weight loss if your overeat, adding dried fruit to your diet probably doesn’t promote weight gain and might be associated with weight loss, according to a 5-year dietary survey published in Nutrition Research in 2011. The authors analyzed the dietary patterns of about 13,000 Americans and found that those who ate dried fruit — at least one-eighth cup each day — had a lower incidence of obesity than people who didn’t eat dried fruit. These findings don’t necessarily mean that eating dried fruit causes weight loss, because people who ate dried fruit also tended to have healthier diets than those who didn’t. However, they do suggest that dried fruits don’t directly trigger weight gain.
Potential Benefits for Dried Fruit
While no food alone will make you shed weight, dried fruit does supply some nutrients associated with fat loss. It’s often high in fiber, which keeps you feeling full after your meals and helps support weight loss. Dietary fiber also softens your stool and contributes to its bulk, which fights constipation to keep you regular.
You’ll also get beneficial iron, a mineral that helps supply your tissues with oxygen, which can help you feel energized and stay active. Iron also plays a role in immune function and it’s essential for DNA synthesis, which is involved in production of new cells.
Buying Diet-Friendly Dried Fruit
Whether your goal is weight loss or gain, choose the healthiest types of dried fruit. Avoid dried fruits sweetened with added sugar, including fruit sweetened with “natural” sugars, like juice concentrate, brown rice syrup or honey. Added sugar ups the calorie content without adding any nutritional value. So even if you’re trying to gain weight, you’ll get more benefits by eating a larger serving of unsweetened fruit to take in more calories. While any dried fruit can contain added sugar, it’s often used in large amounts during drying of tart fruits, like cranberries, so always check labels for the amount of added sugar.
Paradoxical Effects of Fruit on Obesite
Abstract
Obesity is exponentially increasing regardless of its preventable characteristics. The current measures for preventing obesity have failed to address the severity and prevalence of obesity, so alternative approaches based on nutritional and diet changes are attracting attention for the treatment of obesity. Fruit contains large amounts of simple sugars (glucose, fructose, sucrose, etc.), which are well known to induce obesity. Thus, considering the amount of simple sugars found in fruit, it is reasonable to expect that their consumption should contribute to obesity rather than weight reduction. However, epidemiological research has consistently shown that most types of fruit have anti-obesity effects. Thus, due to their anti-obesity effects as well as their vitamin and mineral contents, health organizations are suggesting the consumption of fruit for weight reduction purposes. These contradictory characteristics of fruit with respect to human body weight management motivated us to study previous research to understand the contribution of different types of fruit to weight management. In this review article, we analyze and discuss the relationships between fruit and their anti-obesity effects based on numerous possible underlying mechanisms, and we conclude that each type of fruit has different effects on body weight.
Keywords: obesity, fruit, anti-obesity, pro-obesity
1. Introduction
The significant enhancement in food production during the agriculture revolution in the 18th and early 19th centuries has resolved the problem of famine to an extent, which had constantly threatened the survival of the human species, but paradoxically, modern humans are living in an era when easy access to the energy-dense food is a concern because continuous intake of an energy-dense diet positively influences the body–energy equilibrium and can cause obesity. Throughout the world, modern societies are faced with the problems of obesity and obesity-related diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), worldwide obesity has doubled since 1980. At present, >1.9 billion adults and >42 million children under the age of 5 years are overweight worldwide, indicating its prevalence in all age groups.
Obesity is a multifactorial disease caused by biological, behavioral, and environmental factors, but it is mainly attributed to low physical activity and high consumption of energy-dense food for a prolonged period. Obesity is now one of the main problems in modern society, and intensive research is currently underway to search for a solution to obesity. Current management of obesity has been done at the individual level as well as at the community level. The individual preventions for obesity are mostly based on pharmacosurgical interventions with little success. The outcomes of pharmaceutical drug use for weight management are not significant, and the long-term consumption of these anti-obesity agents might have severe side effects. Surgical manipulations are only useful in the most extreme cases. In addition to the individual-base, population- or community-level intervention for obesity has been pursued by modifying behavioral factors like increasing physical activities, reduction in sedentary lifestyle, healthy diet, and so forth []. Policies and environmental changes also contribute to weight management. In this context, increasing fruit and vegetable intake is widely recommended for preventing and/or treating obesity [].
The beneficial health effects of fruit are well established []. The consumption of fruit is known to attenuate obesity and obesity-related diseases such as diabetes and coronary heart disease []. Similar to the western population, fruit consumption has a dose-response relationship with cardiovascular disease in Asia []. However, in contrast to fruit intake, there is no significant association between the intake of vegetables and hypertriglyceridemia []. Furthermore, several meta-analyses have provided strong evidence that higher consumption of fruit and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of all-causes mortality, including cardiovascular disease and cancer []. Thus, low fruit consumption is considered to the fourth leading contributor to the global disease burden, and thus one of the major attributable risk factors for diseases such as being overweight (high body-mass index (BMI)), hyperglycemia, and hypercholesterolemia [].
Clearly, fruit has beneficial effects on health through its anti-obesity effects. Many clinical studies have shown that increasing the daily consumption of fruit is inversely correlated to weight gain []. It was also shown that the consumption of whole fruit contributes to a reduced risk of long-term weight gain in adults by reducing the total energy intake . Several mechanisms are thought to be responsible for the anti-obesity effect produced by fruit, but still it is tough to point out a particular mechanism that allows some simple sugar-rich fruits to contribute to anti-obesity. Most types of fruit have very high simple sugar content, such as sucrose, fructose, glucose, etc. []. Thus, considering that the overconsumption of simple sugars is one of the main causes of obesity and related diseases [], it is perhaps surprising that the consumption of fruit is associated with anti-obesity in most cases. For this review, we searched available health sciences electronic database, including MEDLINE, Science Direct, Google Scholar, and the Web of Science in two independent phases. First, the paper selection was made exclusively for epidemiological studies to support the anti-obesity and pro-obesity effects of fruit published in the last 20 years, from 1996 to June 2016. Combination of following keywords was used in the process of paper selection: fruit, whole fruit, fruit juice, canned fruit, dried fruit, obesity, body weight, weight gain, BMI, and waist circumference. Second, the search was performed for gathering the information to support anti-obesity and pro-obesity mechanisms, which had no time limitation. Here, we included studies that showed the link between fruit consumption and obesity, thereby providing insights into how simple sugar-rich fruits may contribute to anti-obesity.
2. Anti-Obesity Effect of Fruits
Numerous interventional and observational human trials based on longitudinal and cross-section study designs ranging from small to large population sets in various countries have investigated the close association between the consumption of fruit and obesity. Based on precise anthropometric analyses related to obesity, such as body weight, BMI, and waist circumference (WC), the majority of these studies have suggested that fruit intake is inversely associated with obesity, as shown in Figure 1. These human studies of the association between fruit and obesity can be broadly classified into three different categories: (i) intervention randomized clinical trials (IRCTs); (ii) prospective cohort studies; and (iii) cross-section studies.
Higher consumption of daily fruit is recommended by health organizations as a key factor for maintaining a healthy body weight via various mechanisms.
2.1. Intervention Randomized Clinical Trials (IRCTs)
IRCTs conducted in obese and overweight individuals have shown that fruit intake significantly suppresses obesity []. The first of these studies reported the impact of low and high fruit diets on the body weight, BMI, and WC of obese Spanish females with a BMI of 34.9 ± 2.3 kg·m−2 and average age of 32.6 ± 5.8 years []. After 8 weeks of fruit intervention, there were significant reductions in all parameters in both groups, but a comparative analysis only detected a significant difference in WC. Fujioka et al. reported another IRCT in American obese individuals with a mean BMI of 35.6 ± 4.7 kg·m−2 and a broad age range of 18–65 years, a larger sample size (n = 77), and longer follow-up []. This was a four-armed double-blinded placebo trial with three intervention groups, who consumed extra fresh grapefruit, grapefruit juice, and apple juice. The body weight was reduced in all groups, but the parameters in the group who consumed fresh grapefruit were significantly different compared with the placebo. Another study with apple and pear intake in a hypocaloric diet found significant reductions in body weight and BMI compared with eating oat cookies after 10 weeks []. In this IRCT, three groups of obese Brazilian women with a BMI of 31.9 ± 4.2 kg·m−2 and average age of 44.1 ± 5.4 years received 300 g/day of either apple or pear as a fruit in their diet, whereas the control group consumed 60 g/day oat cookies for 10 weeks. In another IRTC where the original aim was to evaluate the effect of mangosteen juice on obesity biomarkers in American middle-aged obese population, increased mangosteen juice intake for 8 weeks significantly reduced the BMI and body fat mass. A recent intervention study found that pomegranate juice intake significantly reduced fat accumulation, but the changes in body weight and BMI were not clinically significant []. Finally, the outcomes of intervention studies conducted in obese individuals have shown that fruit intake ameliorates obesity-associated parameters, e.g., reduced body weight, improved BMI, and decreased WC. Considering that the intervention studies mentioned above were conducted for short time periods, the impact of fruit intake on obesity appears to be very significant.
2.2. Prospective Observational Studies
Prospective human studies also support the inverse association between fruit and obesity, where these studies have reported data obtained from obese or overweight populations as well as comparisons with normal weight individuals. Most of the studies do not specify the factors that were controlled in the trails. However, the individuals with severe illnesses such as metabolic disorders, terminal diseases, cardiovescular diseases, and other serious illnesses that can influnece the end results were not included in these studies; however, smoking, drinking, physical activity, diet intake, etc. were not restricted but were monitered in the course of the studies. In 1997, Stamler et al. reported that a higher amount of energy intake in the form of fruit resulted in greater weight loss []. In this study, 5%–6% of the total energy provided as whole fruit or fruit juice was considered to be responsible for an annual average weight loss of 2.3–6.8 kg. He et al. conducted a 12-year prospective study in a large population of borderline overweight middle-aged female nurses (n = 74,063) with a BMI of 24.9 kg·m−2 and an average age of 50.7 ± 7 years []. They reported that an increased amount of fruit in the diet reduced the likelihood of obesity. They stated that 0.22 increments and 1.86 increments in fruit servings per day reduced the risk of obesity by up to 14% and 24%, respectively. Vioque et al. also reported an inverse correlation between higher whole fruit intake and weight gain []. Buijsse et al. reported that an increase of 100 g per day in the whole fruit intake was correlated with an average weight loss of 0.017 kg in the overweight population based on data collected from five European countries []. Rautiainen et al. tested the relationship between fruit intake and weight gain in postmenopausal normal-weight women, thereby demonstrating that a greater intake of fruit alone reduced the risk of becoming obese []. A meta-analysis of 17 independent prospective studies reported by Schwingshackl also suggested that the intake of fruit has an inverse association with weight gain []. Other prospective studies have also found negative associations between fruit intake and weight gain or obesity []. Most of these prospective studies indicated that fruit intake may be linked with body weight maintenance among normal weight or marginally overweight individuals. These studies also showed that the increases in body weight were slightly lower in a relatively high fruit intake study group compared with those who consumed less fruit.
2.3. Cross-Sectional Studies
Several cross-sectional studies support the inverse relationship between the amounts of fruit consumed and weight gain over a period of time []. The first cross-sectional study published in the USA by Serdula et al. in 1996 considered a large population of adult men and women (n = 21,892; men = 9292, women = 12,599; age > 18 years). This study showed similar fruit consumption rates in all of the different body weight groups, where the results indicated no association between fruit intake and body weight . After two years in 1998, Trudeau et al. also found no association between fruit consumption and BMI []. In 2002, Lin and Morrison performed a survey of a large adult population in the USA (n = 9117, male = 4709, female = 4408, age > 19) and found a negative association between fruit consumption and body weight . After four years in 2008, Moreira and Padrao also reported a negative association between fruit and obesity, but only in women and not in men . In the same year, Davis et al. reported a negative relationship between daily fruit intake and body weight []. Two of these studies found inverse correlations only in female individuals and not in the male population []. However, the results reported from most of these studies of large populations including males and females detected a negative relationship between fruit consumption and obesity, but self-reporting of end results by the participants were used to analyze the final outcome in most of cases, thereby reducing the reliability of the final results.
Does Natural Sugar From Fruit Cause Weight Gain? Explains This Research
Do you know that fructose present in fruits is known to increase weight? But do fruits increase your weight?
Do natural sugars in fruit cause weight gain? Are you on a weight loss diet and often confused about your food intake? It is generally recommended not to eat junk foods and processed foods during the diet, as they increase weight. Instead, it is considered beneficial to eat dishes made of natural foods like fruits, grains, vegetables, and pulses. But some people believe that one should not eat fruits while following a weight loss diet (losing weight). The rationale behind this is the sugar is present in fruits, which increases weight. Is dextrorotatory sugar present in fruits harmful? Eating fruits is considered healthy (for health) as they contain a lot of minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants, which are beneficial for the body. Maximum fruits taste sweet! This sweetness of fruits is due to fructose, a form of glucose. Artificial sugar is also found in fruits and is known to increase weight. Can sugar in fruits increase your weight? Learn some important things related to weight loss and fruits.
Does sugar in fruit make you gain weight?
Humans have been consuming fruits for thousands of years, as they are considered healthy for all. In such a state, it is challenging to believe that the sugar present in the fruits can be unhealthy for you. Research in this regard also shows that the sugar present in fruits has no significant effect on your body and weight. Do you know why? Because the sugar present in fruits is different from artificial sugar in many ways.
What does the research say about weight gain and fruit sugar?
Scientists have done much research to know the connection of fruits for weight gain. In one such analysis, scientists found that fruits do not increase weight, but help reduce. People who eat fruits are more slim and fit. This study has been published in the journal ‘Metabolism’. One hundred seven obese people were included in this study. The researchers divided all these people into two groups. Of these, the first group was given fructose from 20 grams of fruits daily, and the second was given fructose from 50-70 grams of fruits. Scientists found that the group that ate more fruits lost weight by 48% faster.
Here is why fruit sugar does not increase weight?
Fructose is indeed known to increase weight, and it is present in fruits. But fruits also have a lot more than fructose, which does not allow you to gain weight (due to this fructose), such as fibre and magnesium. Fruits are digested slowly due to fibre, and the body has to spend the right amount of energy to digest them. In this case, the number of calories your body gets after eating fruits, almost the same amount of calories are spent in digesting it, so they do not increase your weight. Apart from this, due to fibre, sugar dissolves slowly in your blood, due to which neither fruits suddenly increase your blood sugar nor cause obesity because your body uses such amount of sugar in its everyday function.