Interesting - this is an excerpt from an article I found on fruit by longtime natural hygienist Dr. Stanly Bass in NYC.

The complete article is entitled "Fruit - Friend or Foe" and it is quite lengthy. Here's the link if you're interested: [www.drbass.com]

FRUIT AND SLEEP
At one time, in studying the harmful effect of excess carbohydrates and its connection to almost all diseases, even though I had previously considered fresh fruit as a natural and healthy food, I experimented with eliminating it totally from my diet for several weeks. I wanted to find out if the sugar in fruit could be harmful, even though fruit was rich in nutrients, calories, minerals, etc. and highly recommended by most nutritionists and doctors.

At that time I found that I felt alright if I could get at least 8 hours sleep, but then, I felt better with 9 hours, and even better with 10 hours sleep, which I attributed to my advancing age. I received a call from a herbalist who was interested in old rare Natural Hygiene books and all books on health. He visited me and we spent almost 8 hours each day for about 5 days, wherein he chose books and we negotiated prices on each. He purchased half of my library, spending thousands of dollars on these books. Having very little time left to eat, I decided to omit all fruit from my diet and live only on salads, proteins and some fat in one moderate meal. The next day he came early when I had only slept 3 hours.

Usually, if I slept less than 5 hours any night, the next day I would feel fatigued after a few hours. When driving I would get sleepy occasionally and had to be careful to not doze off and when difficult to keep awake, I would put the car to a side and rest my eyes and try to doze for even a few minutes.
I was very surprised to find that I was not tired at all, but full of energy as though I had 9 or 10 hours sleep. This continued for 5 days of book sales, even though many hours were spent daily on boring negotiations on many single books.
I stayed on this diet of no fruit at all for about 3 weeks, finding that I felt good as long as I would get at least 5 hours sleep a night on the average.

Then after the 3 weeks I decided to go back to eating fruit again to determine the difference in how I felt. As soon as I added fruit to the diet, I found that I needed a lot more a sleep that same night, sometimes as much as 12 hours if I ate a lot of fruit. I discussed this with Dr. Aajonus Vonderplanitz, a nutritionist in California, and he said that he also needed a lot more sleep after eating fruit. He gained weight quickly from fruit and any cooked food. This had been my experience. The explanation was that the sugar in fruit, even though considered "natural", retained fluid in the body just as salt did. Since sugar in excess in the blood can be considered dangerous, the body keeps it well diluted in fluid as a safety measure.

I recalled days in the past when I had eaten large amounts of watermelon in the late afternoon. That night, 8 hours later I was awakened in my sleep sometimes 8 to 10 times during this night to urinate. I began to avoid these binges due to this sleep disturbance.

Personaly , I've not experienced anything like that, I used to need more sleep when I was on cooked food but we are all different, I get about 6 hours sleep sometimes less and I'm good to go, I think we have to be careful reading stuff like this because you have to take a lot of things into account such as the authors mindset, age, fitness, stress levels and experience plus we really don't know how this guys living, the introduction of more fruits could have caused him to detox/purge emotionally at a deeper level leaving him needing more rest, that's what it sounds like to me especially if he wasn't used to consistantly (a lot longer than 3 weeks) eating a diet high in fruits, you never know!

Be good

F1

I don't like these 'vintage' testimonials by people who go back and forth between fruitarianism, raw veganism, and who knows what over many years at a time, with plentiful mention of binging and a lack of consistency. But sure, whatever, if one time he ate only salads and thus only slept 3-5 hours a night and he liked that, then good for him. But such an anecdote is really not worth anything to me.

Yes F1 it did just occur to me that there could be alot of variables involved... and I have to say that in no way do I think that fruit is bad.

And Dream Earth - all we have is anecdotes. There is no scientific proof of the best diet. Dr. Bass is still alive btw. He embarked on a quest to find the ideal diet when he was a teenager - that's where the trying of various diets comes in.

To me eating no fruit seems forced, and so does trying to eat all fruit. To each his own.

I like reading peoples' stories. Someone said to me once that he talks to anyone, because there's not a person in the world that you can't learn something from.

sunshine79 Wrote:
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> To me eating no fruit seems forced, and so does
> trying to eat all fruit. To each his own.

Exactly, why does he have to "find" a perfect diet when his body probably wants something totally different, maybe if he was focusing on giving his body what it needed he wouldn't need to search...sometimes we just over think things and we totally ignore the bodies call.

juss ma 2 cents

F1

dream earth Wrote:
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> I don't like these 'vintage' testimonials by
> people who go back and forth between
> fruitarianism, raw veganism, and who knows what
> over many years at a time, with plentiful mention
> of binging and a lack of consistency. But sure,
> whatever, if one time he ate only salads and thus
> only slept 3-5 hours a night and he liked that,
> then good for him. But such an anecdote is really
> not worth anything to me.

Yeah, it's amusing to me, I personaly don't think that these guys stick to one thing long enough to make accurate judgements especially when it comes to diet, these guys tend to be very inteligent but they seem to only use their minds instead of their souls, when I first started out I could have written a book about how terrible fruitarianism was but it wasn't Fruitariansim that was bad it was my severe detox symptoms that was bad, but it would have been so easy to blame the fact that I was on all fruits, no greens, nuts, etc, and given up on fruits or the raw lifestyle all together.

Juss ma 2 cents

F1

The fact that Bass would listen to Vonderplanitz, an eater of dead raw rotten animal carcass, is one reason to not pay too much attention of Bass. I could see if one ate a diet with animal products, which are notoriously high in fat, that there would be problems with eating fruit.

That is definitely true, F1; the search for the "ideal, perfect, best diet" is ultimately just an intellectual one, devoid of any real connection to the body and it's feelings, so it isn't actually going to stay with a stable, healthy diet over the long term - because I guess that would mean just facing life beyond the food. I'm glad I'm not on that sort of quest - high fruit/low fat feels good, and I don't need anything more than that; I can't imagine how unhappy my body would be if I spent all my time disrupting it's rhythms by performing experiments on it in complete ignorance of it's needs and wishes.

I think if people that shared their stories were honest and disclosed everything, it would be clearer to most people that the experience doesn't really have much of anything to do with them. But you can read whatever you want to.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/2007 03:26AM by dream earth.

dream earth Wrote:
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> That is definitely true, F1; the search for the
> "ideal, perfect, best diet" is ultimately just an
> intellectual one, devoid of any real connection to
> the body and it's feelings, so it isn't actually
> going to stay with a stable, healthy diet over the
> long term - because I guess that would mean just
> facing life beyond the food.

Ain't it crazy!!!
I'm glad I'm dumb!!!!...

F1

I never gain weight from fruit sugars. This makes no sense to me and sounds like the logic of those on SAD-diets. Fruit sugars wouldn't make you retain water in any way comparable to salt. Salt is an irritant that isn't meant for human consumption and is thus eliminated painfully like one. I don't understand this.

Interesting stuff!!

strange indeed -
although I am finding that I am over sleeping at the moment. I do eat lots of fruit.
BUT - here it is winter and dark all the time, so I think it's natural for me to want to snuggle back into bed and not get up into the cold!

One morning I just jumped up out of bed and wasn't tired at all because I set my mind to wanting to wake up because I had an appointment. I wasn't tired at all that day.

I believe Im tired because I actually go back to bed instead of waking up. That ain't good!

I would not entirely dismiss the article, there may be some truths to it. Most modern fruits are hybrid with too much sugar which cannot be good for the body even eaten raw. The orange juice diet and some popular sweet fruit based diet need to be reexamined on scientific ground. I would not eat oranges or watermelon for an entire day.

Right. The above posts are great by F1...Bryan...and everyone. People can/should be a LOT more concerned about a vigorous self-analysis PROCESS....and IMPLEMENTATION.......rather than an outside-imposed 'perfect diet'. Just a thought.

-David Z. Mason

WWW.RawFoodFarm.com

A person who experiences fruit as having too much sugar for their health is sick and perhaps does not understand the extent to which their body is ill. Rather than blaming the fruit, if they would look at their own lifestyle habits and let go of their belief systems around health, they could heal themselves so they could eat a banana without going into anaphylactic/hyperglycemic shock.

I always hear people talking about fruit being too "hybrid", "sugary", etc.

What are we supposed to eat instead?

Less fruit? More fats (avocados, nuts) and greens? Non-sweet fruits? What is and isn't hybrid? I've heard that papayas are genetically modified, any fruit without seeds is bad news, and that grapes are too sugary.

I eat all of these foods and I could care less. They haven't failed me in years.

Many of the organic fruits offered at local grocery stores are from the same strain as those with pesticides. I don't understand what one would expect me to do if they recommended I eat less "hybrid" fruit sugars.

Firstly, it should be understood that "Natural Hygiene" means different things to different people. The name is not trademarked, nor is it attached to any particular organization or following, so it can be adopted by anyone who wants it. I've found that some of the people who follow its principles nearly to the letter never utter the words, while others talk about it all the time but don't live it. I think Dr. Bass belongs in the latter category.

In spite of his obvious confusion on certain topics, I will say that as a medical professional, Dr. Bass is remarkably open-minded regarding the principles that produce health. This is what accounts for his having done much better in his own health maintenance than the majority of his medical peers. However, Dr. Bass admits regularly indulging in fish, seafood, herbs, oils, eggs and other harmful foods. It's no wonder that he encountered various symptoms, some of which he misinterpreted and responded to incorrectly, which perpetuated the cycle of failure (more symptoms, more searching, leading to more unnatural suppression-oriented practices), and which kept Dr. Bass from realizing his full health potential in the end. Dr. Bass’s experiences are a good example of what happens when a person makes mistakes, including failing to discard the false teachings of the medical system.

As illustration of Dr. Bass’s confusion, medical brainwashing and contempt for nature, I cut and pasted a couple paragraphs from his description of an experiment he conducted on mice in his search for the "ideal diet". He claims to have been surprised by the cannabilistic outcome but then he admits repeating the experiment again with the same foods, and, of course, the same outcome. He sells the abstract of his little 'study' for $28.50. It is embarrassing that he actually believes that his experiment proves something unfavorable about fruit consumption. He states, “From that time forward I have cautioned all prospective aspiring fruitarians to avoid this dangerously deficient diet, since I had proven it on living creatures close enough to man to have some relative validity." Close enough to man? Mice? The only thing that would make the whole scenario more ridiculous would be if Dr. Bass postulated that fruit eating leads to cannibalism.

Dr. Bass also highly recommends the "Protein Power" diet by Dr. Eades, and espouses the 'primitive' or 'paleolithic' diets. Of course even these diets are better than what most doctors recommend, but not even close to what most of us here recognize as optimal or healthful for the human body. That Dr. Bass is not as confused and misguided as most doctors is not a good enough reason for us to take his conclusions seriously.

Best regards,
Nora
www.RawSchool.com

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Dr. Bass wrote:
"I began this project testing raw vegetarian/vegan diets, cooked, lacto-vegetarian, ovo-vegetarian, lacto-ovo-vegetarian, the addition of fish, fowl, meat etc. both raw and cooked. After awhile, I tested the fruitarian diet. In a cage of 40 white mice I put all kinds of fruit. They ate some but were still hungry, so I added fresh corn-on-the-cob and avocado. All seemed well until the 3rd day, when I went to the cage, I saw 8 dead bodies with the heads missing and parts of some bodies eaten. I was shocked at the carnage. This was equivalent to severe deficiencies occurring to humans after 2 months on this type of diet. I immediately put the cage on a full diet including raw milk cheese, cooked food, grains, etc. to stop the deaths. Even with the diet change, other deaths followed for about 4 more days before it ended and conditions returned to normal.

Two years later, I repeated this diet again on this same cage, which had since recovered their health, and the same thing happened. On the 3rd day of this very liberal fruitarian diet which included corn-on-the-cob and avocados, I found 7 dead bodies cannibalized with their heads missing, I immediately stopped this "fruitarian" diet, which was the next direction of all of the 15 different diets + an additional 50 other related follow-up diets which I tested."

After reading the experiments done by Bass, he has lost all credibility in my mind. Anyone who thinks that we can apply results taken from animals living in cages and eating a highly controlled diet to humans, knows extremely little about nutrition or human biology in my opinion.

Bryan Wrote:
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> The fact that Bass would listen to Vonderplanitz,
> an eater of dead raw rotten animal carcass, is one
> reason to not pay too much attention of Bass. I
> could see if one ate a diet with animal products,
> which are notoriously high in fat, that there
> would be problems with eating fruit.

I would think that the content of what somebody says should be the overriding factor in analyzing their writing, not their association. There is still little known about nutrition especially the long term effect of a high raw food diet. Intuitively a high raw food diet should bring great health benefit and longevity but so far the evidence is not there, maybe with the new generation of raw eaters, their more scientific approach, and the new findings we may finally get the missing evidence.

But this does not imply that eating "animal products" with a high raw diet is unhealthy either. Animal products and fruit can be part a healthy diet with proper food combining. I could eat fruit morning and noon and eat animal products for dinner or wait the next day to eat animal products. There are some who can attest this approach working for them. Jack Linnane(in his 90s) and Eric Storm (died at 104) ate animal products with their high raw food diet. TC Fry and Johnny Lovewisdom promoted a high fruit diet but also had many health problems. Thus, there little we know about the proper diet. The evidence is not there.

I have great respect for Stanley Bass because I feel he really has contributed enormously to our body of knowledge through careful, pragmatic investigation based on an unwavering thirst for the truth, no matter where it leads him.

Sharrhan:


[www.facebook.com]

The experience doesn't seem valid to me. Mice are not frugivore. They are rodents. To experiment all kind of diets on them is negating their nature.
Cynthia

going back to what he suggested about fruit and sleep--

yesterday I didn't eat any fruit. I was studying all day, didn't get to the farmer's market, just ate carrots, pumpkin seeds, lettuce mostly. I didn't do anything physical, so I just wasn't craving the sugar or something. ANYWAYS>>>

I couldn't fall asleep. my mind was still churning through it's thoughts. I think I must have fallen asleep around 2. I woke up at 6:30, and didn't even want to try to go back to sleep. oh wow, great, you say? no.

I have had a terrible day. I'm not tired, but I'm emotional. I didn't get on task until nearly noon. It's been frustrating. I ate plenty of apples and grapes today, and will likely be my-fresh-self tomorrow.

But just because it worked to stave off sleep, does not mean it's healthful or constructive to our minds and bodies.

measure twice, cut once.

"In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar." ~r.brautigan

I make paintings

I too get very sleepy on a fruit based diet..but this has been a good thing for me since I've lived my whole life verging on insomnia.

The tiredness I was experiencing..I turned out out pretty severely anaemic. My guess is that I was anaemic for a while before the fruits. I think the fruits just highlighted the symptoms. I'm still eating the fruit, but have added an iron supplement. Starting to feel a bit better, my lips are still very pale..

I was dying of laughter when I read that he tried to give mice fruits, corn and avocado!!!!! And they turned into cannibols!!! hahha duh, I mean, I'm sure that guy did some great stuff with nutrition or whatever but how can you possibly compare a mouse's eating habits to humans?

I don't want to sound mean, and I feel real bad for those little mice, but, that was ridiculous.