No Stupid Questions

Healthy is relative. A handful of fruit is generally fine. Eating a few pounds of grapes in a day is probably a bad choice. There's also a lot of people that conflate fruit with things that have fruit in them as about the same.

They are not mostly sugar, sugars are just a part of the nutrients. Most fruits don't even have that much sugar in them, it varies wildly though. There is also the way these sugars are intertwined with fiber, that make it much harder for these sugars to be processed in your body. So the sugars are released over a greater period of time giving your body more time to react. as opposed to refined sugars. Fruits are always healthier than candy, cookies, or soda.

There is a lot more in fruits than just sugars, there are proteins, vitamins, minerals, fibers. Which are all necessary for a healthy body. Sugars as well are necessary for your body to function.

It is practically impossible, if you're otherwise healthy, to eat too much fruit. I personally eat at the very least 3 kilos or 5 pounds of various fruits a week. within an otherwise varied (vegan) diet. I've done so for the past 10 years. I make sure to test my blood, and so far had zero issues except low vit. d. Which you can't get from fruit.

Why is it healthy? Well, we evolved next to fruits. Our ancestors always plucked and eaten them for millions of years. Just like we've done with all kinds of plants. Our gi tract is the right length, our body cant make most vitamins itself and completely functions on sugars. Fruit is part of a varied diet.

How the sugar is packaged is also important. Standard white sugar is refined to be easier to digest - less gets pooped out. Fruits and berries sugar is (mostly) fructose with fibers and other elements. In the mouth fructose tastes equally sweet but the stomach has more troubles digesting it and converting it into usable energy. So you absorb way less and poop out way more.

A nutritionist will be better able to explain this but I'll give it a try :)

You're maybe overthinking the sugar part of the equation. Berries/fruits contain natural sugar that is a part of the fruit itself. Your body processes that differently since that sugar comes integrated with other nutrients (fiber, Vitamin C, antioxidants, etc.). And you typically won't want to eat say a few buckets of berries in one sitting to equal the same sugar high you get in a processed sugar, all that fiber will feel much heavier and your body is just going to tell you to slow down on its own.

The much worse types of sugars are added sugars e.g. sugars that were processed and now exist separately, then re-added into something else. Take your berry example, process all the sugar out of them so only the sugar exists, then you add those sugars to some other food you wanted to sweeten. Now it's a sugar without any integrated benefits (no fiber/vitamin C/antioxidants/etc/) - your body won't process this processed sugar the same way it used to when it existed as part of the fruit.. you're only getting the bad without anything useful. So you can gobble a whole ton more of those added sugars to get your sugar high without your body getting any indicators to hey, slow down, maybe it's time to stop eating these added sugars.

Whole fruits are pretty healthy in reasonable moderation

if you gorge on 3 boxes of grapes you're still gonna have smashed through over a thousand calories

The big caveat is fruit juices which remove all the fiber that makes you feel full, particularly anything concentrated.

At that point you're getting closer to a soft drink than fruit (though you'll still at least get the vitamins)

Is it weird that I woke up this morning wondering the same exact thing? 😳

The dose makes the poison, really. It's quite hard to reach a harmful amount of sugar by just eating fruit - you're likely to get either full or bored with eating fruit before you start reaching unhealthy levels of sugar. Combine this with fruits and berries generally being a good source of dietary fiber, this makes for a good combination of attributes you want in healthy food.

Please read (or listen to) How not to die. It is a great book, funny and full of cool information, it changed my life a little.

If I remember my highschool biology correctly (which I probably don't, so take this with all the grains of salt), natural sources like berries, fruits, etc... create natural glucose which is what every living organism (including us...use for energy). Meaning when we eat berries and fruit, that natural glucose doesn't need to be converted or processed in order for our body to make use of it. That also gives it a more stable effect in our system.

Refined sugars, on the other hand, need to be processed into glucose before it can bind to (oxygen? I think?) and pass into our bloodstream. That process leaves a lot of junk leftover which can have detrimental effects.

Again...I'm trying to remember a 35 year old highschool biology course, so correct me if I'm wrong.

Ideally focus on grapes fermented into beautiful wine and eat the rest in moderation.

It's the vitamins. These tiny black things that always crawl on top of the fruits...

Because these are naturally grown sources of sugar that is untainted by the joke of the food industry's idea of processing sugar?