Re: Eating Frozen Bananas, Carbs

Hi,

I've only recently limited my fruit intake to once a week. It's mostly due to reading a review of Tim Ferriss' new book showing that orange juice can affect cholesterol. I don't know whether whole fruit does anything similar.

Here's the excerpt:

THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT: FRUCTOSE

Can fruit juice really screw up fat-loss?
Oh, yes. And it screws up much more. Not to speculate, I tested the effect of fructose in two tests, the first during a no-fructose diet (no juice, no fruit) and the second after one week of consuming 14 ounces-about 1.5 large glasses-of pulp-free orange juice upon waking and before bed. The orange juice was the only thing distinguishing diets A and B. The changes were incredible.

Before (10/16, no fructose) and after (10/23, orange juice):
Cholesterol: 203 -> 243 (out of "healthy" range)
LDL: 127 -> 165 (also out of range)

There were two other values that shot up unexpectedly:

Albumin: 4.3 -> 4.9 (out of range)
Iron: 71 -> 191 (!) (out of range aka into the stratosphere)

Albumin binds to testosterone and renders it inert, much like SHBG (discussed in "Sex Machine") but weaker. I don't want either to be out-of-range high. Bad for the manly arts. If you said "Holy sh*t!" when you saw the iron jump, we're in the same boat. This result was completely out of the blue and is not good, especially in men. It might come as a surprise, but men don't menstruate. This means that men lack a good method for clearing out excessive iron, which can be toxic. The increase in iron was far more alarming to me than the changes in cholesterol.
Here is just one of several explanations from the research literature:

In addition to contributing to metabolic abnormalities, the consumption of fructose has been reported to affect homeostasis of numerous trace elements. Fructose has been shown to increase iron absorption in humans and experimental animals. Fructose intake [also] decreases the activity of the copper enzyme superoxide dismutase (SOD) and reduces the concentration of serum and hepatic copper.

The moral of the story? Don't drink fruit juice, and absolutely avoid a high-fructose diet. It doesn't do the body good.
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