Lately I have been in the mood for Fruit Salad, I buy it at Publix cut up peices of fresh fruit, but also add some pineapple, bananas, sliced oranges,grapefruit and blueberries.

I know some fruits have more sugar then others, so how much of this can you eat, and what would be the calories for it, I tried looking it up but to no avail ( btw, every place I looked gives for 1/2 cup servings of one kind of fruit, in my salad I might have a few peice of each of the above fruit...)

Have a good Weekend everybody

Carol

It sounds like a great summer snack to me. If you're trying to cut back on your serving sizes, you might try mixing it with some lowfat yogurt so that it satisfies you more.

I don't know what plan you're following -- are you doing strictly calorie counting or are you following a plan with recommended numbers of servings? You can make a personalized pyramid plan at http://www.mypyramid.gov/ -- might be a good way to see how to balance things.

Even very healthy foods can be eaten in excess....if the recommended serving is `1 1/2 cups....that would give you a pretty good answer. I hate to say weigh or measure each fruit out that would be a little obsessive, unless you had to know for health reasons. But I'd go with the largest portion of fruit and measure by that. Bananas are going to be higher in sugar content than oranges...so measure your bananas and count calories by that amount. Very hard to tell. But there has to be a site out there that has it....fitday.com?????

The recommended amount of fruit in a day for the average person is 1 1/2 cups a day.

There are a couple of reasons for that. Balance is most important, getting the vital nutrients from all of the food groups. You can certainly over do it in the sugar department too. However, spring and summer we tend to eat more fruit because it is more available and also, the fruit contains a lot of water and helps to keep us hydrated.

Some fruits are higher in sugar than others. Banannas and Cantaloupe, mango and kiwi are fairly higher than grapefuit, cherries or oranges.

Anyway, eat your fuit, enjoy it, mix it up, it all makes your body happy. Just don't forget the other stuff too, like protein and whole grains. When you are eating your fruit, maybe have a little low fat yogurt too. Or top off some plain oatmeal. Eat it in a chicken salad.

I keep the Publix cut up fruit in my fridge too. The kids open it and pick at it all day, so do I!!!

I agree with Brie, I choose the most caloric, or the fruit that I have the most of and count that. OR I'll figure out the calorie content of the whole thing based on adding up the calories for each fruit, and then dividing it by how many servings I will be eating it in.

And I also say that as long as you aren't adding sugar or whipped cream or yogurt or anything to it, you would be perfectly fine and healthy to eat 3, 4, 5 "servings" (yes, the 1/2 cup variety) in a day, just so long as you aren't replacing your veggies with fruits, and you are eating a balanced diet around the fruit....and I'm very sure you are! Oh, it is so good to see you posting again Carole!

1 serving of fruit is usually 1/2 a cup so that's why you see that amount when you are looking it up.

I usually estimate fruit salad calories by using the most caloric fruit and using that. So in this case, probably the pineapple would be most caloric.

In terms of how much to eat, unless you have diabetes and are needing to watch your blood sugar, it's certainly healthy and a few servings would have it's place in almost anyone's diet (maybe not all at once though ; ).