What happens if you add fruit to your regular diet, eating three apples or pears as between-meal-snacks every day? I explore this in my video Eating More to Weigh Less , which I titled as a nod to Dr. Dean Ornish’s smash bestseller. Fruit is low in calories, but it does have some. It isn’t calorie-free. So, if you add food—even healthy food—to people’s diets, won’t they gain weight? No, subjects who ate three apples or pears every day added on top of their regular diet lost a couple of pounds. Was that reduction because of all that fiber since our gut bacteria can create anti-obesity compounds from fiber? (See my Beans and the Second Meal Effect video for more on this.) Good question. That’s why, in addition to the fruit groups, the researchers had a cookie group! Subjects ate either three apples, three pears, or three cookies with enough oats in them to have about the same amount of fiber as the fruit. Despite the fiber, adding cookies to one’s diet did not lead to weight loss. ...