There is a whole movement about doing just this called “Fruitarianism” (http://www.fruitarian.com/) . Steve Pavlina did it during a Raw food experiment. You might have to read through his 30 days raw diary to find it, but start here: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/12/30-days-raw/

It’s quite intriguing, when you get into reading about veganism and paleo diets… I actually find myself turned off of anything refined, from whole grains (like wheat) to even tomato sauce that’s had ascorbic acid added. Honestly, the healthiest I’ve felt in YEARS was when I did a raw diet for two weeks. It’s just horrendously expensive to maintain (especially, if you’re trying to eat locavore, as well).

Do you read Zen Habits? I’m sure you do. He’s got great perspective on vegan eating on there, as well as on mnmlist.

I feel pretty paralyzed a lot of the time when it comes to fruits and vegetables. The locavore perspective dominates my thinking and, as a result, I find it challenging to eat as I should. Do you balance this in at all, Raul?

I remember this in my biology class way back in grade 10. Although human are omnivores… human physiology says we should be herbivore as we don’t have the proper anatomies to be a carnivore. We don’t have fangs like other carnivorous animals to rip meat apart, We have soft nails and even more telling, our jaws can move sideway – which is an indicator we grind our food with our back molar. Another strong indicator that our are meant to be herbivorous is the fact we have to cook our meat otherwise we risk death from raw meat eating disease such as e coli, we lack the proper stomach acidity.

So long way of answering your question but YES indeed you can, you are meant to! :p

I knew a guy in Uganda who ate only avocados. Sometimes he had a banana. He was very healthy.

I’ve been eating a cruelty-free diet for the most part since January which, for me, means eating 99% vegetarian and only having meat on special occasions as a kind of ritual sacrifice (organic, free range of course) and cheese when I know its origin. Nonetheless, it seems that when I do eat meat now, my stomach does not like it at all. I think the bottom line is that your body will adjust to whatever you give it – it just takes time!

Although the preamble should be, if you want to go on a fruitarism – you should move to a tropical country where there is a wider variety of fruits. Besides our ancestors were gatherers – foraging the forest for berries and leaves.

Everything in moderation. The end result of my eating bananas every day for years ended up with me having trouble digesting them now. Same thing with bran cereals. Make sure you get all your food groups though, proteins etc… mix it up, it’s good for ya! (but the occasional fruit day shouldn’t hurt).

Eating only avocados and bananas isn’t exactly a terrific diet. For one thing, it’s quite high in fat.

Fruitarianism is one of the more popular raw vegan options, because it’s so easy: every piece comes in its own case! And as long as you stick to apples and oranges and leave the mangosteen and suchlike alone, it can be more affordable than a traditional meat and potatoes diet.

The problem is, it’s critically low in protein, particularly if one is physically active. I’ve seen raw vegan sites that estimate, for instance, that watermelon is 14% protein: it is actually less than 1%:
http://nutrition.about.com/od/fruitsandvegetables/p/watermelons.htm

There is, as far as I’m aware (and I did spend eight solid months being lectured morning-to-night by a raw vegan zealot) there is no combination of fruits alone that can provide all the essential amino acids and, guess what? They’re essential.

Many people say Steve Jobs was fruitarian when he was at Reed; he recently came clean and admitted he was just really poor and ate whatever he could get his hands on, and ate fruit because it was cheap and he didn’t need a kitchen to cook it in, but he wasn’t really fruitarian.

Oh, I didn’t “only” just eat bananas [grin], my point was that I was eating them everyday (among many other things) and that the fact that it was everyday did a number on my system over time. Just not healthy to eat just one type of thing all the time, we need lots of variety in out diets as raincoaster points out. One interesting thing I noticed with meat-eaters though, is that although it’s recommended that we only need a piece of protein/meat that is about the size of a deck of cards for each meal, many people eat 2-3 times that much at a meal. Hmmm…probably better to cut back on the meat a bit and increase the variety of veggies on ones plate…..

@Zoeyjane – whole grains are the opposite of refined foods, so not sure why you would give those up.

@Minna – I think we’re quite capable of eating meat. Most people think the appendix’s main function was to process bones that were ingested. Also, with regards to e-coli — e-coli is a modern ailment, mainly a result of us feeding cattle grains when they were only meant to be fed grasses. That results in a more acidic environment inside of cattle which contributes to the outbreaks of ecoli E157H7.

@raincoaster – the avoidance of fat is another modern change in nutrition with little to no scientific backing. For example, the Inuit diet is 70-80% fat, and they have one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the world. In the 70s someone linked high fat to high cholesterol, and high cholesterol was linked (very very weakly, and now for the most part considering erroneously) to heart disease. So the powers that be made an extremely large (and wrong) leap of faith linking high fat with heart disease. Almost every paper published today in the field of food and nutrition shows that a low-carb, high fat diet is generally better for you than a high-carb, low fat diet. If you don’t believe me, search pubmed.com, which I usually do every Sunday night.

We need proteins to rebuild/build muscle tissue. We also require fats as many vitamins are fat soluble. Despite what most people believe, we actually don’t really need carbohydrates in the body. Other than the brain, most other tissues in the body can run on ketones, which are produced as a byproduct of fat metabolism. The glucose that the brain needs to operate can be obtained from the blood from dietary carbohydrates, or as a result of gluconeogenesis (where the body makes its own glucose) from dietary fat and/or protein.

I actually am one of the few people that doesn’t really think fruit is all that good for you. I think vegetables are great, but the majority of the carbohydrates in fruit are sugars, which can stimulate insulin and can cause blood sugar to go out of whack. In the old days, fruit was loaded with vitamins and minerals, but as we deplete the soil that’s less and less true, which means in a lot of ways eating fruit is a lot like eating candy.