Fruit for Breakfast
- Cynthia Chin-Lee
- Feb 16
- 3 min read
Most of my posts focus on cancer prevention and management but this one is for everyone, regardless of cancer concerns. If you can make one change in your diet, this is it.
Have fruit and fruit only for breakfast.
Forget the pancakes, toast, eggs, and bacon! If you want to improve your overall health, eat fruit only for breakfast with a beverage such as fresh juice or herbal tea with lemon.
This advice comes straight from Mark Simon, nutritionist extraordinaire and founding director of Nutritional Oncology Research Institute.
I mentioned this dietary custom to my friend from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Sheila Gill, and she said, “Yes, I’m with you on that..” In fact Sheila told me about the health classic Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond (1985 edition), which explains why this simple change can make a big difference.
Marilyn Diamond writes, "The reason almost everyone expresses a liking for fruit is that our bodies crave it instinctively. With its sweet blends of rare flavors, delightful aromas, and eye-pleasing colors…Fruit is, without doubt, the most beneficial, energy-giving, life-enhancing food you can eat."
Anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Alan Walker, discovered “early human ancestors were not predominantly meat eaters or even eaters of seeds, shoots, leaves or grasses. Nor were they omnivorous. Instead, they appear to have subsisted chiefly on a diet of fruit.” Dr. Walker determined this by studying the markings on teeth. Through his study of fossilized teeth, he noted, “Every tooth examined from the hominids of the 12-million-year period leading up to Homo erectus appeared to be that of a fruit eater.”
We are biologically adapted to eat fruit.
Fruit cleans the body of the toxins from other foods like meat.
Fruit has the highest water content of any food. If you get your calories from fruit, you will naturally eat fewer calories from meat and processed food.
Fruit requires less energy to be digested than any other food.
According to Diamond, “Everything consumed by the human body must eventually be broken down and transformed into glucose, fructose, glycerine, amino acids and fatty acids.” Your brain works on glucose; it can’t work on anything else. And fruit provides glucose.
So why fruit for breakfast? Fruit is the perfect food and it takes minimal digestion.
When you wake up in the morning, instead of giving your body the work of digesting toast, eggs, cereal, milk, pancakes, bacon or any other of the traditional American breakfast foods, give your body the perfect food: fruit!
Fruit because it requires minimal digestion should be eaten by itself (not with other carbs, fats, or proteins).
Around 8 am, I eat fruit for breakfast with a cup of tea.
That fruit is one single type of fruit (if possible). This week it was watermelon on Monday, bananas on Tuesday, mango on Wednesday, apples on Thursday, and mango again on Friday.
I have a second portion of fruit around 11:30 am. Usually a different fruit, such as oranges or dates or whatever we have.
Then I wait at least 30 minutes so that the fruit is digested and then I have a vegan lunch: pasta primavera, rice and vegetable stir fry, fried potatoes. I generally have sauerkraut and kimchi as well for my probiotics.
Dinner is similar to lunch.
I have at least 2 to 3 servings of fruit a day. And I feel great, even better than before my cancer diagnosis almost five years ago.
Note to people concerned about cancer: fruit is the best food you can eat and many people eat a fruitarian diet for the first 90 days after their diagnosis to kickstart their recovery. If you have read some of my other posts, you know that the two amino acids you want to minimize if you have cancer are: methionine and cysteine. The food lowest in methionine and cysteine is fruit!
If you want to look up the methionine levels in fruit, see page 2 and 3 of the methionine food chart.