elilla, trans woman travesti @elilla@transmom.love

got a theory about why I eat fruit so much more than most Germans.

like fruit for me is the same as candy: sugary sweet treats I don't have to cook and can just bite into with zero effort, so I snack on them all the time. early morning they're about the only thing I can eat (fruits and candy). but most of my gfs just ignore all the fruit at my place. I would understand a general aversion to "healthy" food, but I find it easier to get Germans to eat vegetables than bananas, which is a bit baffling.

an average adult has 200g+ of bacteria and other microorganisms in the gut. (that's a lot of bacteria. like, a *lot*. we all are communes.) these lil friends do part of our digestion, and they adapt to diet. vegans famously have a different biota than non-vegans¹, but it's not just vegans; in general if you eat a lot of food Y you'll get more of the bacteria that process food Y. a Japanese diet will give you algae-eating bacteria. a diet rich in sorghum gives you bacteria to digest cellulose.

what's interesting is that our inner commune can hypno our brains (the "microbiota-gut-brain axis")². they influence our food preferences, and that's one reason why it's hard to radically shift diet in a short time, and why people generally reject other countrie's cuisine without adaptations etc. in particular, our inner biota is a source, or possibly ~the~ source, of sudden intense cravings for a particular thing.³

when you first go vegan and you get these sharp cravings for meat or cheese, that may well be your meat- or cheese-adapted bacteria getting desperate. similarly, the intolerance you get for animal tissue after a few weeks might not be entirely ethical/psychological. (the other day I accidentally bought noodles with eggs in it, and I tried to eat them anyway. buying things that exploit animals is unethical; eating them once they're already there is ethically neutral, the damage is already done. I had lost blood and needed the nutrition, so I wanted to avoid wasting it. but I just couldn't do it. I forced down a few mouthfuls but the scent of egg was overpowering, I could barely taste anything else. egg doesn't feel like _food_ anymore.)

fruit feels like candy to me because fruits *is* candy. an apple has 19g of sugar, a Snickers bar 20g. coca-cola has 9g sugar/100g, orange juice 8g. 1 starbucks muffin will net me 33g of sugar; 1 average mango, 45g. I eat a lot more sugar than the average German, therefore I'll have a lot more sugar cravings, therefore snacking on fruit feels so good. it's a drug for me. pure and crystalline ♪

(that would also explain the cultural aspect, why Brazilian homes are full of fruit compared to here. Brazilians in general consume a lot of sugar, the country is founded on it. it's not by accident that sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco are instruments of power in my religion.)

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478664/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut%E2%80%93brain_axis#Gut_microbiota
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270213/