Does fruit contain as much fructose today as it did 50, 100, 200 years ago? Or have we selectively bread the sweetest fruits to the point where monkeys cannot eat bananas?

Monkeys banned from eating bananas at Devon zoo

Zookeepers say the stereotypical food actually makes monkeys more aggressive, rots their teeth and can lead to diabetes

[...]

Zookeepers said the fruit grown and exported for human consumption have far higher levels of sugar than the ones monkeys would eat in the wild – to the point that it’s bad for their teeth and can lead to diabetes.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys-bann...

> Does fruit contain as much fructose today as it did 50, 100, 200 years ago?

Maybe due to selection of larger, sweeter fruit, yes. But processed food contains various sugar variants, including fructose (think "high fructose corn syrup") so fruit isn't the only (not even the main) source of fructose for many.

This was very unexpected, thank you for the link.

This is interesting! And I love bananas, too.

Lustig argues that the fiber in fruit is the reason fruit does not cause issues in primates where we strip the fiber by straining or most commonly using hfcs as a sweetener. It’s a good-to-great video and worth the watch though I do not have the background to critique it.

A half cup of Dole canned pineapple is 15g of sugar. Eating a half cup of fresh pineapple is 8g of sugar. Pineapple is higher in sugar that many fruits. A cup of raspberries is 3g of Fructose.

This is a little mixing of apples and oranges but the high fructose we tend to eat are much higher than primates that eat fruit.

If you eat an apple for example yes, it contains fructose. Eating or drinking something with corn syrop is like eating LOTS of apples. Which you normally wouldn't do. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-fruit-good-or-bad-fo...

Eating the equivalent amount of apples to HFCS is never going to have the same effect. Fiber content and other good stuff will completely remove the effects that you might see fructose isolate.

Raw fruit isn't a problem, not even for humans. Products where "sugar" is replaced by fructose or other, simpler sugar variants is. Various sugar substitutes are added to e.g. canned fruit in "juice" which is mostly some kind of sugar. Which lets marketing say "less sugar" ...

And "high fructose corn syrup" is ... almost pure fructose. Which the human liver can only process a limited amount per day.

Anecdote: a young guy in Freiburg (Germany) got Covid recently and as a result lost his sense of taste afterwards. Now he isn't interested in fast food any more as everything tasty "bland" and can "easily" eat vegetables which he disliked before, even broccoli or Brussels sprouts. Which made him loose more than 50 pounds. Don't get this wrong, it's not an incentive to get Covid, but an example of the effects of abstaining from fast food and soft drinks.

The most common form of HFCS is less than half fructose.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Compo...

maybe I should get magicberry tabs again, they make everything taste sweet (more like aspartam sweet) without actually giving you sugar

I think fruits in nature probably have a lot more water and are manually picked and eaten which limits the speed and quantity of intake.

Meanwhile humans can eat concentrated fruits. Imagine picking and eating 100 grapes, vs eating a handful of raisins.

Primates also eat fermented fruits which have enzymes that convert to something more digestible. By going for the cleanest best looking fruits/foods we have decreased the diversity of our gut bacteria which increasing the things people are allergic to.

No research done, but I suspect it's because of the sheer amount that we consume, at least in the US due to the use of corn syrup in packaged foods.

Sure, but that’s not the question. Presumably gorging on HFCS would be bad for chimps, too. I was asking about the claim that “fructose” is unhealthy.

Food is more properly understood in totality than merely as isolated nutrients. However, it is easier to design scientific studies that focus on isolated nutrients.

Whole fruit contains vitamins, minerals, fiber, and significant amounts of water. Whole fruit contains intact plant cell walls. It's very important to eat intact plant cell walls, but that's difficult to determine from studies of isolated nutrients. Because of the bulkiness caused by water and fiber in whole fruit, it's difficult to eat large amounts. For example, it takes about four oranges to make a glass of orange juice. Most people would not eat four oranges, but most people could easily drink 1 or more glasses of juice.

The wild fruit eaten by primates has less sugar and more fiber compared to fruit cultivated by humans. Human cultivated foods, including plants and livestock, are much richer compared to wild plants and animals, having more fat, sugar, starch, and calories in general, than what could evolve in the absence of pest control.

Humans have evolved quite differently than other primates. We have a rare ability to digest large amounts of starch, a capability shared almost exclusively with rats and pigs. It's difficult to compare our diets.

Primates consume significant amounts of foliage (leaves and such). You probably should too, green leaves are very excellent for your health.

I guess my first thought is: the amount of fructose in fruit is small relative to the amount in, say, a cola. Also, fiber might mitigate the insulin response. Also, we aren't eating fruits found in the wild (which is the relevant ecological context for this discussion). We have selectively bred fruits to be bigger and sweeter.

I wonder if the enzyme uricase has anything to do with it. While reading about gout, I read that uricase is not found in humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons but is found in other primates. Apparently uricase is found in most animals except the above. And somehow uricase is also related to fructose processing.

I was told that most fruits have a comparable amount of fructose and glucose and that eating excess fructose is what causes diseases and autoimmune reactions.