Professor Sarah Berry

speaker

555 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Professor Sarah Berry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · How to eat sugar without gaining weight (crush your cravings and end energy crashes) | Prof Tim Spector & Prof Sarah Berry · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

So if you consume a whole apple versus apple juice, what happens is you have a more gradual increase in circulating blood glucose.

you're unlikely to get a dip in circulating blood glucose.

But if you have the apple juice, then you've got this big rush of sugar and then this big dip.

So then you're going to have all of these problems like higher inflammation, overconsumption of calories, etc.

What's also really important to note is that you've got loads of other great things in that fruit.

You often have lots of components like polyphenols, other vitamins, other minerals that can act on anti-inflammatory, antioxidant pathways.

So that means, for example, if you were to have, let's say, a big portion of berries or a large portion of an apple, for example,

Even if you do have an increase in circulating glucose, which you will have because it's a normal response to having the sugar from a food.

Yes, firstly, the fiber is blunting it a bit, but also the polyphenols will also counterbalance.

So almost like block in simple terms, that increase that that glucose is causing in inflammatory measures.

And so that's why, firstly, juice behaves differently to the whole fruit because of the change in the fiber and the glucose dynamics, but also why we cannot think of sugar in fruit in the same way as we think of the sugar that you add to your tea because of all the other wonderful components in that fruit.

Where there's really interesting evidence is randomized controlled trials that compare people consuming the whole fruit, the pureed fruit, and the fruit juice, and then equivalent amount of sugar.

And you see in terms of the health effects, it kind of graded that way where the whole fruit is best for you.

Then the fruit puree, the second best, that has still all the constituents of that whole fruit, but it's just kind of mashed up.

So it's a little bit less good because you've taken away some of the structural elements.

Then you've got the fruit juice that's a little bit worse because you've taken away the fiber, but you might still have some of the beneficial bioactives like polyphenols or antioxidant vitamins.

And then obviously the worst is the sugar.

So you kind of, I think, think about it in that graded way.

So smoothies are still a really good source of many different bioactives, fiber, et cetera.

Just don't drain out the pulp.

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