We all know the phrase an apple a day keeps the doctor away, right? But is it true? Today we're looking at the origin of this food myth to see whether or not there's any truth to this age-old adage.
Should the government's new health program just be dumping a whole bunch of Granny Smiths at our door and calling it a day? Or is this just a whole bunch of bunk? Spoiler alert!
An apple a day is definitely doing something for your body and it's uh probably not what you expect. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the show that aims to be the apple of your subscription feed. Actually, you know what? Scratch that.
There is a new apple for your subscription feed approaching right now. It is our newest channel, the final one that completes our main theorist ring. Guys, this is a huge moment that's been tw- 12 years in the making, so are you ready for the grand reveal? Hey, Head Editor Dan, can we get a big reveal here where, I don't know, we take an apple and then we like slice the apple and then inside the apple isn't a bunch of seeds, but it's rather like the logo and we reveal it that way?
Yeah, can we do that? I want to make it feel big, okay? All right, here we go. Drum roll, please.
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Basically, if you want to find style theory, there are plenty of ways that you can find style theory. Now, enough about the apples of our cheeks, it's time to go back to the apples of our plates. The saying, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, is probably one of the oldest and most iconic food sayings.
That said, the phrase actually has morphed a good bit over time. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the popular form of the phrase was, an apple a day, no doctor to pay. But we can actually keep rewinding from there.
The saying actually seems to go all the way back to- 1866 in Wales, where it started as a different rhyme, eat an apple on going to bed and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread. The earliest usage I could find of the more modern phrasing actually came here in an 1887 Welsh newspaper that documented a local fruit growing show. It's actually a direct quote taken from the event, spoken by someone named Mr. Chilton, who used the line as a joke to the crowd, but he also says that this is an old saying.
So, apparently it was an old saying. even way back then. It's crazy how old this thing must be.
Can I also just call out too how cool it is that I can use the internet here in 2023 to check a 200 year old local Welsh newspaper? Anyway, it's time that we put this 200 plus year old adage to the test. I just want to know if it's true.
There are about a million health fads out there these days. You know the ones I mean where it's like, eat this handful of walnuts every day and lose 40 pounds of belly fat. Or the classic, just put Windex on it. This is basically the OG version of all those click bait fad foods. So is it real or just the internet scam that came in the days before the internet?
Can an apple a day really solve all of your health problems? Remember, we're talking about health advice that has its origins from a time when doctors would prescribe cocaine to treat indigestion. Needless to say, not every bit of wisdom from that era has stood the test of time.
So let's just take a look at what apples actually do for you and whether it's enough to put the old doc out of a job. Hold on. Wait.
Wait a minute, what's this? Association between apple consumption and physician visits. Someone actually did a study on this with actual real people? People who ate an apple a day, and then they see how often they had to go to the doctor.
Holy cow, we've been scooped! At first, when I saw this article while researching this theory, I was pretty surprised. I mean, here I am asking stupid questions on my internet show, when in fact, researcher Matt- Matthew Davis and his team conducted an 8,000 person study that was published in JAMA, an extremely reputable medical journal, where the primary outcome measure was in fact keeping the doctor away. I mean, it doesn't get much more explicit than that. Sometimes you feel like the only crazy person in the room asking these ridiculous questions, but then every once in a while you just find your tribe.
I see you, other Matthew. I see you, and I'm here for you. So what did this study conclude? Well, out of the 8,000 people, thousand participants, over 700 of them were classified as apple eaters, people who had at least one apple a day. Interestingly enough, the apple eaters statistically attained higher levels of education, they were more likely to be non-white, they were more likely to be non-smokers, and most important for our purposes today, they were about 6% less likely to need to visit the doctor.
There you have it, amazing, run to the store and buy yourself a bag of Honey Crisps immediately, or... maybe not so fast. You see, as is the case with a lot of studies, all things aren't equal between groups of people. Once the research team adjusted for socioeconomic status, demographics, and underlying health conditions, the results were no longer significant between the apple eaters and the non-apple eaters.
They ultimately concluded that Team Apple had no difference when it came to time spent in the hospital or mental health issues. The only real benefit that they saw was that they took slightly fewer prescription medications, which might have saved them a bit of money I suppose, but... they also just turned around and spent it all on apples, so it ultimately netted out the same. So is that it? Episode over?
Are apples just another useless fruit parading around as something healthy but in actuality are just sugar, water, and a waxy skin? Well, before we upset the apple cart, while they might not save your life, there may be other reasons why this old adage still persists. From a nutritional standpoint, apples are a source of antioxidants like vitamin C and vitamin E.
The thing is though, apples aren't exactly unique in that regard. In fact, you know what's an even better source of both vitamin C and E? Oranges. Oh yeah! I went there.
You know what just happened there? You know what I just did? I just compared apples to oranges.
It can be done! Apples and oranges are about even when it comes to vitamin E, but the citrus lives up to its reputation when it comes to the vitamin C. A single orange is enough to satisfy your suggested daily allotment of vitamin C, while an apple is providing roughly one-tenth. of that. Maybe that's why they tell us not to compare apples and oranges.
They don't want us to see how thoroughly oranges dunk on apples when it comes to micronutrients. So maybe we're not getting a whole lot of benefit there. Let's see where else apples might be able to find a place in our diet.
When it comes to keeping the doctor away, is there any other reason you'd want to pick an apple? As a matter of fact, yeah. Apples have something that your body actually needs a lot of, fiber.
It has around twice as much fiber as oranges. And that matters because you're not getting enough fiber in your diet. Yes, you, the person watching this.
video right now. According to a paper published in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 95% of Americans aren't getting their recommended daily intake of fiber. 95%!
That is literally almost everyone watching this video. Probably also me and most of the team who made this video. Hey Yossi, Dan, I know you guys have to listen to this because you're editing this video.
Stop, take a break, go get some fiber. Statistically, you really need it. I care about your bowels. Love, MatPat. Fiber is incredibly important for all types of people because it's basically tuning up the plumbing in your body all the time.
Are you an athlete? Fiber helps keep your blood sugar stable and regulates your metabolism. Are you above your healthy weight at the moment? Fiber helps keep you full longer. It helps regulate hunger signals.
It can even lower rates of bowel cancer and colon cancer. For everyone else, fiber keeps you from getting super constipated all the time, so you can thank your apples for your last regularly scheduled bathroom visit. A single apple, depending on size, has around one-fifth of your recommended daily fiber intake. take, at least according to the American Heart Association.
Fiber deficiency was actually such a big public health concern several years ago that a group of researchers gathered at the Food and Fiber Summit in Washington, D.C. to try and come up with ways to address the issue. So unless you're one of that 5% of people that's living on a diet of lentils and broccoli, yeah, you could probably benefit from a couple more apples in your diet.
That being said, while apples are high in fiber, they're hardly the only high-fiber food out there. An apple has around 4 grams of fiber, roughly equal to what you get from a cup of oatmeal or a serving of broccoli. Though, let's be honest, a serving of broccoli a day? Not gonna be winning the marketing battle on that one.
You know where broccoli is gonna be winning over apples, though? Low sugar content. Apples are- packed with sugar.
And I don't just mean like, oh, the nice healthy fruity sugars, which we all kind of assume is different from bad candy sugar, but at the end of the day, it's all basically the same. And apples are a bigger culprit of this than most of its fruity friends. See, the fruits that we eat today are the result of generations upon generations of selective breeding. This is nothing new. It's been true for as long as humans have practiced agriculture.
In other words, thousands and thousands of years. There are some examples of this that make for really dramatic visuals. For example, this is what watermelons looked like back in the 1600s. Which, mind you, is already after generations of selective breeding.
And this is what wild bananas looked like back in the day. Certainly not as appetizing. But our modern cultivated fruits don't just look- different, they taste different, and they have themselves a different nutritional content, weighted towards making them more delicious, which in practice means lots more sugar.
In fact, we've bred our fruit to be so sweet that some zoos have actively stopped feeding their animals human-grown fruit because it's just too sweet for them. A modern apple has about as much sugar as a Snickers bar. Let that one sink in the next time you gotta weigh your snack options.
So am I saying that you should opt for the candy bar over the fruit? No, definitely not. Your body will actually metabolize the apple differently, because all that fiber we just talked about will slow down the digestion of the sugar.
This is something that you can actually measure on your own if you wear a blood glucose monitor. Candy and other foods with added sugars will cause a much bigger spike in your blood sugar than if you ate a fiber-rich piece of fruit, even one with an equal amount of sugar. So it seems like across the board here, the apple is...
fine? for you a guess? It's got a lot of sugar, it's got a moderate amount of fiber, it's got a teeny bit of vitamins. Apples are about as innocuous as it gets. They don't really help you a lot, but they also don't make you any less healthy, really.
There is, however, data that'll show that apples will in fact keep doctors away from one specific part of your body, your mouth. That's right, if you hate visiting the dentist and you want to save some money on braces, it might be time to nab some Red Delicious and get to munching. First stop, the dentist. If you swap out the sugar that you might be eating from your cookies, brownies, or candy for an apple instead, you could see a lot fewer cavities in your future.
The sugar in apples is floating around alongside that fiber and water. That makes it significantly less likely to stick to your teeth than other sugary snacks. This is also another place where apples beats out many other fruits, including oranges, mangoes, and pineapples. While citrus fruits like oranges are famous for being high in vitamin C, they're also famously acidic, and acid can wear away the enamel of your teeth, leading to tooth decay.
Historically, people have also believed that biting into apples can help scrape the plaque off your teeth, which is not true according to the data, and a little gross according to me even better than saving you a trip to the dentist though is saving you a trip to the orthodontist as a two plus year braces kid with all the rubber bands and cross bites i could have potentially saved myself a lot of face if i'd eaten more apples as a kid that's right a study coming from the department of dental medicine at sweden's karolinska institute found that chewing hard foods like apples can play a crucial role in helping children to grow and develop healthy jaws. Quote from their study, Chewing food, especially hard foods, directly affects the size, shape, and density of the jawbones. In fact, a lack of proper chewing can result in weak jaws among children. In other words, the more hard food that you practice chewing, the more you build not only jaw muscles, but jaw bone. which can impact everything from the overall size of your jaw to the whole proportion of your face.
In fact, there's research suggesting that one of the reasons that people in industrial nations seem to be needing more and more orthodontic care these days is that we've gotten too used to eating softer foods, resulting in some kids having underdeveloped jaws that are too small for all the teeth that they have to accommodate. Having a strong jawline? Great for school picture day and face reveals. Avoiding the need for braces?
Even better. So yeah. pick up an apple and build that jawbone a little.
An apple a day keeps the orthodontist away. Which is great, because that guy's expensive. But hey, your theory journey isn't done.
There are still five more new episodes that you can go watch right now over on Style Theory. Check them out by clicking the link on screen. Help this new channel get a bunch of watch time so YouTube's algorithm is like, hey, that's a pretty darn good channel.
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I will see you on over there. It is a theory weekend binge session. And as always, my friends, remember, it's all just a theory.
A food theory. Bon appetit.