Why Fruit For Dessert is a Bad Idea - By:  Stephanie Forgues, New Leaf Wellness

So many dessert choices and of course, with your good intentions for a healthy lifestyle, you want to make the right one. Fruit seems like the safe choice since it is, after all, fruit and fruit is healthy.  Here’s why fruit is actually not the ideal choice for dessert.

Fruit is designed to digest quickly.  It’s best to eat fruit on an empty stomach and on it’s own so it's got room to do it's thing. When we eat a large meal, we have a slower digestive time as there are different combinations of foods going down the transit way all at once.

When we eat a large meal, sometimes we don’t give our digestive system enough room to digest the way it needs to.  This is one of the many reasons meals should be smaller and more frequent, rather than the typical three ‘square meals’. These large meals make us feel full, also an indicator that there is too much in at once and not a lot of room for proper digestion.

Allow me to paint you a little picture.
We eat our dinner.  “Here comes the food!” says the dump truck (our fork) to the pit (our stomach) down below.  Digestive juices start to flow the minute we smell our food, chew chew chew, chop chop crunch, swish, swish, organs start to move about breaking down our food and delivering the nutrients to where they need to go throughout our body. There is a lot that goes on during this process and it takes time.

On to dessert and here comes the fruit.  Delicate little simple delicious fruit, although nourishing and well intentioned, ends up going down onto the pile of food that is taking it’s sweet time to digest.

Let’s go for a visual here:
Picture a slide at the park and the kid at the bottom hasn’t gotten off yet and about 3 or more kids go down, now there’s a pile up. That last kid to go down is the ‘fruit’. Just sitting there, he’s so tiny and fast and wants to just finish his ride down the slide but all the big kids have stopped him and slowed him down.

The fruit, wanting to just get on with it, nourish you and get out of your system is now stuck in there waiting... fermenting... now disgruntled and creating a glue inside your body.  This glue will linger long after the dinner is gone.  This glue will stay and wreak havoc inside you and stick to anything new you put in.
Long lived the undigested proteins inside your gut. The longer these particles stay in your body, the longer they have to invite their unfriendly gut friends to a new kind of party and you are the host. A party of gas, bloating, allergies, and a range of other illnesses. Sounds like a great time for them, not so great for you and your future health.

So what do you eat for dessert, you ask?!
Well, you can let that pretty picture I’ve painted for you happen inside you, OR you can reach for a healthy piece of dark chocolate (a piece, not the whole bar!) OR you can opt for no dessert at all.  Is it really necessary?  Maybe it’s just a habit we’ve had since childhood, and habits can be broken.

  And if you do choose sweets or have a cake to share in celebration of a birthday, wedding, or whatever, choose the portion wisely and eat that following a meal.  If you eat that alone, you’re more likely to have a blood sugar spike and crash.  Eating it with other things ensures a slower breakdown of sugar.

You don’t have to cut desserts out completely, just be wise.  Choose something small, if anything, but not fruit, not for dessert.