Organic Apples vs. Organic Apple Sauce There's a BIG Difference

This past week I was invited to speak to a group of students at Westfield State in their Department of Exercise Science. 

 

I always loved going back to a college campus and speaking to students.  It seems like yesterday I was sitting in their seats, eager to get out into the world and start making a difference in people's lives. 

 

Each week my goal is to bring you a segment of information that will improve your quality of life as well as those around you.

 

 

In this segment, Sunday Stuff You Should Know, I'm going to help you understand the Food Matrix.  This may explain why you may not be able to stop eating certain foods, and how those foods could be eroding your health one mouth full at a time. 

 

 

Food processing affects the physical structure of food and how this in turn affects our bodies. The principle of the matrix is pretty straightforward: that food is not merely the sum of its constituent parts. 

 

The purpose of the digestive system is to destroy the food matrix.

 

Let's use apples as an example.

 

 

The fibre that gives an apple crunch and solidity makes up just 2.5 per cent of the apple's weight.

 

The other 97.5 per cent is juice.

 

The way the fibre is arranged around the cells and the fluid - that's the matrix.

With this in mind, a small group of scientists back in 1977 fed ten people apples in three different forms:

1. apple juice without any of the pulp (fibre-free)

2. raw whole apple smoothie (like apple sauce) and

3. whole chunks

Here is the insulin in response to the three different apple preparations:

What they found was that both the juice and the puree caused blood sugar and insulin levels to spike higher than the whole apple, before falling to a lower level than they had been in the first place.

 

As a result of the sugar crash, all the participants still felt hungry.

 

The whole apple, meanwhile, made blood sugar rise slowly before it returned to the baseline level - no crash, and the fullness from the whole apple lasted hours.

 

It seems our bodies have evolved to manage the sugar load from an apple precisely, but fruit juice is a relatively new invention.

 

Apple juice, which is typically around 15 per cent sugar, behaves much like any soft drink. But so does the apple purée, even though it contains all the constituents of the apple, including the fibre, and was made moments before consumption.

 

 

Your best bet is to consume food as close to its natural source as possible.  The softer the food the faster and more severe blood sugar levels will rise and then quickly fall, resulting in more cravings.