'Fruit Is Bad For You' : A Tale Of Stupidity

News Flash Kids : Fruit is bad for you. You must stop eating it. Immediately. I'm not even kidding.

Today I had to go to the dentist. Not for anything sinister, just a scale and polish. I've never had a scale and polish before. I expected it to be something very sinister. It wasn't. At least until the point where the dentist poked me (very) hard in the gum with his drill-bit. It hurt, a lot. So I pulled away and sulked. My gum was bleeding. The dentist did not see this as any kind of issue, and carried on with the rest of the scale and polish. Following this, he decided to lecture me because it isn't "normal" for a person's teeth to hurt *that* much during a standard scale and polish. I resisted the urge to tell him that the scaling and polishing was fine. It was the drilling of my gum that was causing the problem. He decided to tell me that the cause of the problem was acid erosion and was most likely caused by eating too much fruit. And here's the priceless part : he said fruit is bad for you, you should only have it in moderation. So, there you go. Don't eat fruit. I celebrated this by having a large glass of fizzy ginger beer when I got home, safe in the knowledge that it wasn't fruit juice (ergo, it must be okay for my teeth).

This isn't the first time I have been informed that eating fruit is bad for you. A colleague of mine forwarded an email that she had received about drinking water and eating fruit. It basically said that you should never eat fruit after a meal, only as a snack between meals (a tooth-destroying snack ... better to have a biscuit perhaps??) and that you should never, ever drink cold water. The reason for this? Because both of these things cause chemicals in your body which give you cancer. Yes, you read that right. It's official: eating fruit and drinking water is bad for you. Don't do it.