Are they? Depends how many you eat.

RN here, it’s because your body has a more difficult time accessing the sugars in fruit form. They are wrapped up in multiple types of fiber which add bulk to your digestive system and serve as kind of a shield for your body to less easily access the sugar. The juice is essentially just the sugar with all the fiber strained out, has others have said this causes a situation where you can drink the calories from like 18 oranges in 45 seconds, and your body can access it immediately and easily. This is also why whole fruit is actually a good thing for diabetics because the glycemic index is actually pretty low.

There was some guy on telly did a test. Half the group had to eat oranges. The other half had to drink orange juice. Then swapped them over the next day. I can’t remember the exact setup but i think it was like ‘eat/drink as much as you want, stop when you feel full’.

Everyone was able to consume far, far more calories in juice form and probably far more sugar than they needed.

I think like even eating enough oranges for 1x300ml glass was hard for many people to do in fruit form. Basically, the rest of the orange filled them up and that’s what we’re better evolved for: slower digestion of a more varied mush and lots of fibre and stuff like that.

The juice is far too easy for us to eat way more than needed.

They are like 11g of augars in 100g lf berries. They are not mostly sugar

Because it takes quite a lot of effort to eat a huge amount of sugar in the form on fruits and berries. They also have some vitamins, fibers and other stuff in them too.

There is sugar, absolutely. And that’s probably where most of the calories come from. But there is also water, cellulose (fiber), and vitamins/minerals - doesn’t have much non-sugar caloric value to change that balance, but it’s still important. And nobody serious is suggesting you eat only fruit, so you can get non-sugar calories from other sources and it can be balanced in the big picture.

It’s kind of like an appropriate amount of dressing on a salad, the good outweighs the bad and makes you more likely to actually eat that nutrition-positive food.

Source: I’m some guy on the Internet. You can trust me.

There’s also quantity. Eating an orange is healthy. Drinking a glass of orange juice is like eating six oranges after removing the fiber: not heslthy

All that sugar is bound up in fiber, making it slower to release and keeping it from spiking your blood sugar into pre-diabeetus. Grind that same fruit down (juice), destroy its fibers, and now you got diabetes in a can.

Fiber. Fiber helps you feel full, so it is harder to over-eat fruit in comparison with chocolate bars, gummy bears, or even fruit juice.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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.