Do unripe pairs contain the same about energy as ripe pears?

We put Denis' question to nutritionist Toni Steer... Toni - I think the short answer to Dennis' question is no. The human body is very efficient at extracting calories from food. There is some evidence to show, and I've looked at this actually with ripe and unripe bananas, is that with the riper banana you get a slightly quicker rise in blood glucose.

Chris - Did you eat an unripe banana?

Toni - This isn't me. This is a paper so.

Chris - Oh, so you make some other poor person eat it. That's disgusting!

Toni - It wasn't that bad. So with the unripe banana you see a slightly slower rise in blood glucose, so you could probably apply that same kind of theory as well to the pear in question but, nevertheless, the digestion of the starches and the sugars is very efficient. So we have the amylase in the mouth that breaks down the starch. You've got the stomach that mixes the food and breaks it down and actually, by the time you get to the small intestine, around about 50% of your starch is already started to be broken down. Then the breakdown really into the monosaccharides or the simple sugars from the fruit occurs then in the small intestine so, by the time time it gets to the small intestine it's very efficiently broken down and very efficiently absorbed. So I think the answer is; don't worry about the ripeness too much - you'll get the calories from it.