Fruit vs Vegetable: The Misguided War

While your average person probably likes both food groups well enough, many cooked food vegetarians and vegans and many raw foodists think of fruit as, at best, an occasional snack, and believe vegetables should be the basis of a good diet.

Some go so far as to call fruit overhybridized, a nonsensical term if there ever was one.

On the other side you've got those who think man shouldn't be eating vegetables at all, and that we can get all the nutrients we need from raw fruit.

Neither of these extreme positions makes much sense from a nutritional or practical perspective.

So, what if, like Herb, you just want to know which to emphasize in your diet? In this article we'll examine the fruit vs vegetable debate in more detail and help you come to some conclusions.

Fruit Vs Vegetable: What's The Difference?

From a nutritional and digestive perspective, there are some large-scale differences between fruits and vegetables.

Both are plant foods and far outstrip other food categories in terms of nutrients, leaving meat, eggs, and dairy in the dust.

When paired off against each other, both have a pretty wide assortment of vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients, but fruit takes the lead with the largest amount and variety of vitamins while vegetables have a larger and more diverse supply of minerals.

Two import differentiations revolve around calories and digestibility, and both factors are key in determining the role either food group can play in our diet.

Fruit Vs Vegetable: Which Vegetables Can You Eat Raw?

There are plenty of vegetables that man chooses to grow, but most of them are not particularly digestible.

Ever try to eat raw cassava or bit of uncooked wheat? What about raw green potatoes and beans? Even if you can choke them down, you won't particularly enjoy the experience.

The fact is that man has traditionally relied on the cooking process to turn otherwise-hard-or-impossible-to-digest foods into something he can consume.

If survival is our sole goal, then this makes sense, as getting in calories is of chief importance, but no one needs to starve in today's food-abundant world.

When we rely on cooking, we destroy much of a food's nutrient content and cause the creation of carcinogens, two things we definitely want to avoid.

Sinfully delicious raw dressings can spice up your salad every night of the week. Don't worry, they're also low fat and incredibly healthy. Find out how to create amazing salad dressings and sauces from scratch. Check out Savory Raw Dressings and Sauces!

If we do the wise thing and avoid cooking, we're left with a much smaller range of vegetables to eat. You can see an overview of the many types of vegetables and learn which ones are good to eat raw here.

You'll see that what we're left with are the easy to digest leafy greens, celery, and a few other species, as well as the rougher-but-still-edible cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower, all of which work well raw.

Fruit Vs Vegetable: The Calorie Differential

If anyone tries to use these vegetables as their main calorie source, they will fail to get enough energy to maintain their body mass because there is simply not enough room in the stomach to accommodate the huge mass of vegetables it would take to get enough calories. Over time, if people only eat these raw vegetables, they will waste away and remain chronically low on energy.

This is one of the major stumbling blocks experienced by fruit-avoiding raw foodists.

One common exception to this is when someone tricks themselves into thinking their diet is mostly vegetables but actually having it be mostly fat. Many raw foodists fall for this trap, putting tons of fatty dressings, nuts, seeds, and avocados on top of their salads. This will give them enough calories, but ensures many health problems down the road, such as high blood sugar.

Fruit Vs Vegetable: Getting Enough Vegetables

When I was suffering with colitis, I didn't get why fruit was important. Like just about every American, I'd grown up eating it as a snack food, having a single apple of banana after school or as a compliment to a breakfast cereal. It certainly never occurred to me that it could be a staple food.