Laura Schoenfeld: Dried fruit … technically, I think you could probably call it Paleo. Assuming it’s just dried fruit and there are no preservatives or sugars added to it, it’s technically Paleo. The one downside about dried fruit is that it’s really easy to overdo. I don’t know if you’ve ever had dried mango or dried bananas or anything like that … or even dried apples, but it’s a lot easier to overeat on dried fruit than it is to eat too much fresh fruit. This is one of those things where the Paleo semantics is a little bit unclear. Dried fruit technically would be allowed, but it really depends on your patient’s goals. If you have a patient that has a goal of weight loss, you might want to at least just do 30 days of no dried fruit or give them specific portion amounts, say, like no more than a quarter cup of dried fruit per day. If your patient doesn’t have weight to lose or maybe has weight to gain or has trouble getting enough carbs because maybe they’re on the autoimmune version and they can’t have potatoes or maybe they just have a gut issue that doesn’t tolerate starches very well, then doing dried fruit might actually be a good thing for them.
There’s no rule against dried fruit technically on the reset. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t always support people’s goals if they’re eating a lot of dried fruit. Think about it like nuts. Nuts and seeds are definitely still allowed on the reset, but if you’re eating a cup of almonds a day, then that’s probably more almonds than you should be eating. I had a client one time that was eating 1,400 calories’ worth of almonds every day. I think she was getting, like, 500 calories of other foods, but it was the almonds that were causing a lot of her symptoms and a lot of her weight gain. Dried fruit kind of goes into that category of foods that should be enjoyed in moderation if they are something that you think is going to work OK for your particular patient.