The sweet taste of ripe fruit may lead to think that the calories brought by a fruit increase with the maturation process. In fact, as the ripe fruit also increases its content of simple sugars, while organic acids (such as malic, citric and tartaric acid) are responsible for the sour taste.
However, it should be pointed out that these sugars do not originate from nothing, but from the hydrolysis of starch, which abounds in unripe fruits and decreases with the ripening process "transforming", precisely, into simple sugars (glucose and fructose). Since our digestive system is perfectly capable of splitting the starch into sugars, effectively replicating what happens in the ripening process, an unripe fruit has the same calories as a ripe fruit .
It should be noted, however, that our digestive system struggles a little more to digest an unripe fruit than a mature one; therefore, although the calories are the same, unripe fruits require a greater digestive effort, which translates into a reduction in caloric intake net of the energy spent to digest and absorb the food.
