Settle A Bet

At breakfast this morning, one of my colleagues came to the table with a bowl of cut strawberries and pineapple, and a whole kiwi. This struck me as a bit odd, since there was a whole bowl of fresh, cut kiwis with the rest of the fruit. So, I asked her why she would take one that she was going to have to peel when someone else had already peeled some for her, and she said that it was for the vitamins - that once fruit was cut, it would lose its nutrients.

I guess I may have looked a bit sceptical.

Two others chimed in with support for her theory - that any fruit that's been cut and out for an hour is way less healthy than fruit that hasn't been. I did not buy it, and told them so in my very politest voice... thankfully, all three of them know me so it wasn't a problem, but as soon as breakfast was over I got onto the internet to find the truth (becuase if there's one place you can be sure of finding the truth, it's on the internet).

Turns out, it makes very little difference if fruit has been cut or not, and some fruit can actually become more beneficial with air exposure.

What I find amazing about this is not that there are drastic differences between how Europeans and North Americans think about food and nutrition, nor that my spidey sense is in good working order... it's just trying to remember how we settled things like this before the internet. I remember with a friend of mine from Calgary... we would occasionally disagree about the correct pronunciation of a word, and while neither of us is super-competitive, both of us love to learn, so we would gleefully head to a dictionary and look it up... not really caring if we were right or wrong, but being thrilled at the prospect of just being a little bit better, in some way, because of the search. But for other things that were a little tougher to research, we ended up in more than one (amicable) deadlock.

There are three things that I love about the internet. I can find information (about important topics like the effect of being cut on the vitamin content of fruit) in a dizzyingly short amount of time. It lets me join communities of interest, like with my cigar guys, that can turn into real relationships and real friendships with very real people. And third, it lets me communicate with people I care about, no matter where (or when) we are. Sure there's a lot of crap on it, and I have seen close-up that it can be used in destructive and terrible ways.

But it's pretty killer for settling a bet.