Fruitarian Diets: A Summary of the Views on Beyond Veg
To Those Considering A Fruitarian Diet. While the material on Beyond Veg is openly critical of fruitarian diets for a number of reasons, ill will toward the good and decent people making up the majority of the fruitarian movement is not one of them. Indeed, if we wished fruitarian individuals ill, the best strategy would be for us to join with those who promote the diet under dubious pretenses. Here's a brief overview of our stance on fruitarianism, why we are extremely skeptical of the credibility of those promoting it, and a plea to consider the issues critically before putting both your mental stability and physical health at risk by attempting fruitarianism as a long-term maintenance diet.
Fruitarian Diets in Practice:
Problems, Word Games, and Denial
The Fallacy of Fruitarianism. Word games as to what constitutes "fruit" are endemic to the fruitarian program. So are long-term health problems when fruit is defined strictly. The moral of this summary of the state of the fruitarian, and of the fruitarian movement: Look beyond the word games and examine what fruitarian advocates actually do, and see how well the rhetoric reflects the practical realities. (from Part 3 of the "Paleolithic Diet vs. Vegetarianism" interviews)
1970s-era "Fruit for Thought" 4-part investigative article series.(ordering info) While we were not able to obtain permission to reprint this classic investigative series on fruitarianism from The American Vegan Society's Ahimsa newsletter, we highly recommend it, and provide here information and details on how to order it from the original publisher. Also see our summary of the major points of the series (from "The Fallacy of Fruitarianism" subsection of the Psychology of Idealistic Diets interview--go about halfway down the page).
See Tom Billings' dietary bio for his sobering real-life experiences as a (former) fruitarian over a period of 8 years.
Fruit Production in the Real World
Wild vs. Cultivated Fruit table. Fruitarian claims that fruit is the most natural and perfect food for humanity don't take into account how different fruit in the wild is from the kind we are used to in civilization--the kind around which most fruitarian theory has been implicitly constructed. This table details the significant gaps between the two.
Brave
New Fruits: An Introduction to Transgenics
A balanced introduction for non-technical readers to
the controversial field of transgenics: the genetic engineering of
fruits to introduce genes that are otherwise incompatible (e.g.,
genes from bacteria or animals). Republished on Beyond Veg with
permission from Fruit Gardener magazine.
Fruits
of Warm Climates, by Julia F. Morton. (Offsite link.)
This book by the late Julia Morton is now available online, and is literally
an encyclopedia of tropical and subtropical fruit. Individuals with an
interest in fruitarian diets would be well-advised to study this book.
Warning: one side-effect of studying this book is that you will
quickly learn that many of the fruitarian "experts" are astoundingly ignorant
about fruit.
Analysis of Fruitarian Pseudoscience Claims
Fruit Is Not Like Mother's Milk: The Nutritional Fallacies of a Popular Fruitarian Myth Exposed. Does fruit really have a nutrient profile resembling that of mother's milk, making it the "perfect" food? Not so fast, oh fruited friend. With a fully documented examination of the voluminous nutritional data available on the issue, this thorough piece of scholarship examines the wishful thinking involved in the oft-repeated but unsupported "fruit is like mother's milk" theory.
The introductory comments to this lengthy article serve you up a quick overview of the major points covered to whet your appetite for more. From there, if you aren't keen on poring giddily over all the detailed tables in Section I yourself, you can hop to Section II's follow-up analysis, which summarizes the relevance of all the nutritional data for the statistically wary, comparing how well sweet fruit vs. a "sweet fruit + avocado blend" vs. goat milk "fit" the nutritional profile of mother's milk (or not). Tying things all together, Section III's discussion delves into the logic behind fruitarian defenses of the theory and finds them to be, er, well, like so much pap.
An appendix analyzes an alleged statistical "proof" that milk is similar to fruit, and shows that the proof is invalid and fraudulent.
Don't be a sucker--get off the breast and off the bottle by treating yourself to the real food for thought presented here.
Creationist/Fruitarian Whoppers about Evolution. Having been previously pushed into a corner by the extensive scientific evidence about humanity's prehistoric diet, one raw-foodist promoting a fruitarian diet decided to mount an attack on evolutionary science itself on the internet's Raw-Food listgroup in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a bit of respectable credibility. As things turned out, however, their broadside posting was discovered to have been plagiarized from Darwin on Trial, a currently popular creationist treatise by Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson. If you're unfamiliar with the related evolution vs. creationism debate, you'll find this reprinted reply to the assertions not just a thorough refutation of creationist misinterpretations of evolution but also a good education in the tenets of both sides.
Going Ape over Chimp Diets: Dispensing with Fruitarian Monkey Business. You also might find yourself chuckling as you read of this same fruitarian's just-as-shameless tall tales about the diet of chimpanzees. The accompanying reply of thorough refutations documented by scientific reference sources illustrates just how far-fetched and ungrounded some fruitarian claims can be, especially those that come complete with a bit of chest-beating.
Miscellaneous/history of fruitarianism
England, 1875: A Vegan, a Fruitarian, and Opposition to Animal Experimentation. Documents a person in 1875 following what we now call a fruitarian diet, and a different individual following what we now call a vegan diet. (This article is a side result of a search to identify the earliest use of the term beyond vegetarianism.)
