Just why is a bite of that sweet apple better for your health than chomping on a cookie?

Though we often hear that fruits are a much more nutritious and as equally delicious snack than anything you can find in the candy aisle, it’s sometimes easy to forget why that is. Now, thanks to the "Fig. 1" webseries produced by the University of California, you can learn why the sugar in fruit is fundamentally different than the added sugar in products such as soda, and it’ll only take you less than two minutes!

For one, their version of sugar, fructose, is only part of what goes into each bite. "There’s a lot of other things beside just fructose," Dr. Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at UC Davis, explained in the video. "All sorts of bioactive compounds — some of which haven’t been discovered yet — that do positive things for our health."

And that isn’t the case for soft drinks. "The soda and the sugar-sweetened beverages pretty much only have one thing in them, and that’s the sugar," said Stanhope.

Fruits also protect against a variety of chronic illnesses like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and as Stanhope notes, the people who take in the most fruit tend to live the healthiest lives.

If that’s not enough, they’re also pretty damn filling. "Chances are, you’re not gonna be able to overeat fruit to the point you’re gonna have a high-sugar diet, just from fruit," Stanhope elaborated.

So go ahead and enjoy that plum, kiwi or orange. You’ll only be the better off for it.