Podcast Episode #8: Yoga, Massage, Cherries & Watermelon

Ben Greenfield (0:02)

Welcome to the bengreenfieldfitness.com Podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting-edge fitness, diet, and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist, an exercise, diet, and wellness guru. And each week, I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this week's podcast from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield from bengreenfieldfitness.com, and on this week's episode number eight, we have a ton of awesome content to bring to you. Johnny Gillespie of Balanced Athlete Yoga is gonna be with us, as well as Tim Gilreath of Therapeutic Approach Massage. I've also got a Q&A section for some of the questions asked in this week's podcast episode, as well as a review of the newest content at bengreenfieldfitness.com. So let's go ahead and dive right in with our question of the week from a podcast listener. And remember, if you have questions, you can email them to me at ben at bengreenfieldfitness.com or feel free to add comments to any of the posted content at bengreenfieldfitness.com. I love to see it when people actually read a post and leave a comment, get it out there, get it in public, and we can generate some discussion because that's what this blog is all about.

So question from listener Al.

He says, in a recent podcast, you answered a question concerning eating as many vegetables as one wants because you feel that it would be difficult to overeat that type of food. I wonder if you feel the same way about fruits. I eat bowls of fruits every day.

We take advantage of whichever fruit is in season and on sale and buy as much as possible. For example, we are now in watermelon season and I can eat a large watermelon in one day and not those wimpy single serving size melons. Then when grapes are on sale, I overdose on those and move on to oranges, et cetera. Can I eat too much of a good thing?

And the listener continues, I am also fanatically in love with concentrated orange juice and have been drinking several glasses a day for years, primarily at breakfast with about 16 to 20 ounces and one 8 to 12 ounce glass at night before I go to bed. I believe that it is the elixir of the gods. What are your feelings on this?

Well, if you remember in last week's podcast, we talked a little bit about vegetables and caloric consumption of vegetables not adding up to be anything significant at all. For instance, I think we said that 10 cups of broccoli was something like 200 calories. So can we say the same thing about fruits? Well, if we go to that same website where we looked at the amount of calories in broccoli, and that was nutritiondata.com, let's pull up a watermelon and let's look at one melon that's 15 inches long with a diameter of about 7 1⁄2 inches, and that's about a medium size melon. We're looking at 1,355 calories, 341 grams of that from sugar. Incidentally, that's about 114% of the daily recommended load of sugar in a 2,000 calorie diet. With an estimated glycemic load of 93, we'll talk about the glycemic index in a second, but first of all, it is highly obvious that fruit has far, far more calories and far more calories from high glycemic index sugars than vegetables do. So the answer to that question is yes, you can eat too much of a good thing. Most of my clients who are trying to control their weight or trying to control their blood sugar levels follow my recommendation of 2 to 3 pieces of fruit per day. That would be, for example, one apple, one banana, and a small handful of berries. Now, the difference between fruit and vegetables in terms of its effect on your hormonal levels is the glycemic index. And basically, the glycemic index measures how quickly a sugar ends up in the bloodstream after you eat a food.

Some fruits are low on the glycemic index. Now, all vegetables are low on the glycemic index, but if we look at fruits, some of the fruits that are lower on the glycemic index and have less of an effect on your blood sugar level and therefore less of an effect on the conversion of sugar into fat would include cherries, which are low, grapefruits, apricots, apples, pears, plums, peaches, oranges, grapes. And then we start to get a little bit higher with kiwi fruit, bananas, fruit cocktail, mangoes and papayas, apricots, raisins, all those are a little bit higher on the glycemic index. And then when you get up to those real citrusy fruits and especially melons, very, very high on the glycemic index, much, much more likely to wreak havoc on your blood sugar levels. So not only can you eat too much fruit, but there are also some types of fruits that are more damaging than others. Now in response to the question about orange juice, concentrated orange juice, well, concentrated orange juice would be off the charts in terms of its level of glycemic index. It would probably be close to white bread, which is ranked 100 Watermelon, incidentally, is in the high 70s.