Myth: The fruit in the morning is gold, silver from noon to 3 pm, copper from 3 pm to 6 pm, and lead after 6 pm. Truth: Judging from the search results, this sentence should come from an old foreign proverb. The original text is: Fruit is gold in the morning, silver at noon and lead at night. As early as 1893, it was recorded in The Art of Living in Australia written by Philip E. Musk. Interestingly, the literal meaning of English proverbs expressing the meaning of "going too far is too late" is similar to that of rumors, except that the protagonist is replaced by butter (silver at noon and lead at night). Although I'm not sure whether foreign friends still understand this proverb literally, from the perspective of nutrition, it doesn't have much scientific significance. Some people think that the truth of this "gold, silver and copper" is that eating fruit in the morning is the easiest to absorb, and eating fruit at night is the worst. This explanation is too taken for granted. In fact, the digestion and absorption capacity of the human body has little to do with the time of eating. The ability of digestion and absorption is mainly related to the secretion of digestive juice and gastrointestinal peristalsis. After eating, the digestive system of healthy people will secrete digestive juice and enhance peristalsis to promote digestion and absorption, which is not directly related to the morning and evening of eating, but has a certain relationship with age. Usually, the secretion of digestive juice in the elderly will decrease and the digestive function will decline. In other words, whether in the morning or at night, there is no difference in the absorption of fruits by the digestive system. Imagine that you don't eat fruit at night, but you still have to eat something else for dinner. Moreover, fruit is a very digestible food, because water and carbohydrates are the most abundant in fruit, and carbohydrates are the fastest and most easily absorbed by the human body among the three energy-supplying nutrients. In addition, in some dietary suggestions, there will be a saying that "eat fruit in the morning". The starting point is often because the nutritional composition of breakfast for most residents in China is too single, usually only staple food and meat, eggs and milk, and the proportion of fruits and vegetables is too small. If accompanied by some fruits, it can provide vitamins and dietary fiber, which is more conducive to balanced nutrition. From this point of view, advocating eating fruits in the morning is conducive to enriching the breakfast of China residents and improving the quality of breakfast. But that doesn't mean it's bad to eat fruit at night. Needless to say, fresh fruit has many benefits to health. There is no strict time limit for eating fruit. Fruit is very beneficial to our health, and nutritional advice all over the world suggests eating more fruit. The latest American dietary guidelines recommend that adult men eat 2 cups of fruit a day, and adult women eat 1.5 cups of fruit a day (1.5 cups) (1 cup is about 237 ml). China Nutrition Society recommends that adults eat 200-400g fruit every day. But the reality is that the consumption of fruits by residents all over the world is still relatively low, which is far from the recommended consumption. Therefore, the problem we are facing now is more about not eating enough fruit than eating it at the wrong time. The healthy plates of Harvard School of Public Health suggest eating some fruits three times a day, and half of the best plates are fruits and vegetables. There is no emphasis on eating only fruit for breakfast and not eating fruit for dinner. At the same time, in order to improve everyone's fruit consumption, it is also recommended that you put the fruit outside where you can easily see it, so that you will want to eat more. Need to be reminded that eating more fruits here is to replace some other foods with fruits on the basis of constant total energy. In other words, the daily total energy intake should remain unchanged. While eating more fruits, we should moderately reduce other things, such as meat, starchy staple food, fat and other foods. If other foods are not reduced, but the amount of fruit is increased, it will lead to excessive total energy intake and increase the risk of obesity, which is not good for health.