Nick NorwitzMD PhD, Oxford-Harvard | Metabolic Health Educator | “Stay Curious”

150 Large Bananas?! WTFruit. 🍌😳 #fruit #nutritiontips

5 Feb 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:08

In this short segment, the narrator cautions viewers that simple Google searches or popular social media posts can dramatically mislead people about which foods are truly high in specific vitamins or minerals. The speaker illustrates the problem with two concrete examples: a cup of mango provides only 10% of the daily vitamin A value, whereas a single ounce of beef liver supplies over 2,000 µg, making the mango a relatively high‑vitamin‑A fruit but not a high‑vitamin‑A food. The second example debunks a viral WebMD tweet claiming bananas are a good calcium source; a large banana contains merely 7 mg of calcium, meaning one would need to eat about 150 bananas daily to meet the recommended intake. The narrator emphasizes the need for nuance, invites viewers to watch the full YouTube video for deeper insight, and peppers the talk with light‑hearted puns.

Chapters

Be careful when Googling "high vitamin X food" or "high vitamin X fruit" as you can get profoundly misleading results. For example, Google will tell you that a mango is rich in vitamin A. But 1 cup of mango, which is 165 grams, contains only 89 micrograms of vitamin A, or vitamin A precursor, which is only 10% of your daily value. By comparison, just 1 single ounce, 28 grams, of beef liver contains over 2,000 micrograms of vitamin A. So while mango might be a relatively high vitamin A fruit, it is not actually a high vitamin A food. Or as another example, take this joke of a tweet from WebMD, which has 3 million Twitter followers, claiming a banana is a good source of calcium. One large banana has about 7 milligrams of calcium. So you need to eat 150 large bananas per day to get your recommended intake of calcium. Bananas are not a good source of calcium, irrespective of what WebMD says. You want more nuances? Check out the full video on YouTube. It'll be worth your time. I peachiate you. And watch out for puns.