I’m berry mad

I came across a tweet recently from a guy on Twitter who is aiming to make blueberries his niche, to become the “blueberries guy.” He’s from the corner of social media that runs interference for fructose, where people believe that fruit can be consumed in vast quantities without consequences. Last week he posted, proudly:

I eat 3-4 lbs (yes pounds) of blueberries per week, with probably another 1-2 lbs of raspberries per week, 4-5 apples a week, 7-8 bananas a week. My only question is, when am I going to be diagnosed with diabetes?

Ok, I’ll play. I replied:

Diabetes, who knows, but gout, soon. I used to make monumental fruit salads for lunch almost every day, and I found myself in the rheumatologist’s office in my early 40s.

In fairness, low-fructose berries are a good choice if you want to consume a responsible amount of nature’s candy. I should have added to my tweet, however, that since minimizing my fruit intake, I have been gout-free — seven years and counting.

Nevertheless, blueberries guy replied back:

Diabetes and gout from eating too much fruit? I highly doubt it. Diabetes and gout from sedentary lifestyle, caloric excess, poor sleep, not enough sun, not enough exercise, being overweight/obese, too much alcohol, other poor food choices, etc. … Probably a lot more common.

Note how the argument from blueberries guy has shifted. He’s no longer claiming that fruit is unequivocally healthy. Instead, he’s saying that it’s possible to offset bad food choices with an otherwise perfect lifestyle. You could replace in his reply the word *fruit* with *ice cream sundaes* and the principle would still hold.

Whether you can outrun a bad diet is an interesting discussion, and to some extent the answer is yes. Like I wrote in my travelogue from Ibiza: “With enough sun and plentiful meat and fish, I’m pretty sure you can live forever.”

In any event, the evidence that sugar (in all forms) causes relentless, across-the-board damage to health continues to pour in. While writing this post, I received randomly in my inbox two fitness-related subscription emails. Both talked about the danger of excess insulin. In newsletter one, the author wrote about how too much insulin has been found to be a driving factor in fatty liver disease. In newsletter two, the author described new research into how the coronavirus, and the jab, are negatively impacting pancreatic function, leading to metabolic abnormalities like diabetes.

The upshot of all this, pace blueberries guy, is that anyone who cares about health should be obsessed with reducing the amount of insulin floating around in his or her body. Step one would be to cut sugar — in any presentation — whether it’s from frozen yogurt, breakfast cereal, or yes, blueberries.

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For more about the connection between fruit and gout, see this Jacked Check post.