Breakdown of El médico recomienda frutas porque tienen muchas vitaminas y fibra natural.
Questions & Answers about El médico recomienda frutas porque tienen muchas vitaminas y fibra natural.
In Spanish, when “doctor” is the subject of a sentence, you normally use an article:
- El médico recomienda frutas. = The doctor recommends fruit.
If you are talking directly to the doctor (direct address), you drop the article:
- Doctor, ¿qué recomienda? = Doctor, what do you recommend?
So here, El médico is the subject, not a form of address, so it takes el.
Both are widely used and usually interchangeable in everyday speech:
- médico – slightly more “technical”/neutral word for the profession (like physician).
- doctor / doctora – very common in Latin America when you address or refer to a physician, even if they don’t literally have a doctorate.
Examples:
- El médico recomienda frutas.
- El doctor recomienda frutas.
Both sound natural in Latin America here.
The accent shows where the stress falls:
- médico is pronounced ME-di-co (stress on the first syllable).
- Without the accent (medico), the stress would naturally fall on the second syllable (me-DI-co), which is actually a different word: medico = “I medicate” (from medicar).
Because médico is stressed on the third-to-last syllable (an esdrújula word), it must have a written accent in Spanish.
The verb must agree with the subject:
- The subject is El médico → 3rd person singular (“he/she/it”).
- The infinitive is recomendar.
- Present tense (indicative) conjugation:
- yo recomiendo
- tú recomiendas
- él / ella / usted recomienda
So with El médico, you need recomienda:
El médico recomienda frutas… = The doctor recommends fruit…
In Spanish, when you talk about eating/using some amount of something in general, you often use a bare plural (no article):
- recomienda frutas = recommends (some) fruit / recommends eating fruit (in general).
- como frutas = I eat fruit.
If you say las frutas, it sounds like you mean a specific set of fruits already known in context:
- El médico recomienda las frutas que compraste.
The doctor recommends the fruits that you bought.
Here the idea is a general recommendation, so no article is more natural: recomienda frutas.
Spanish has several similar-looking forms:
- porque (one word, no accent) = “because” (a conjunction).
→ Recomienda frutas porque tienen… = …because they have… - por qué (two words, accent on qué) = “why” in questions.
→ ¿Por qué recomienda frutas? = Why does he recommend fruit? - porqué (one word, with accent) = a noun meaning “reason”.
→ No entiendo el porqué. = I don’t understand the reason.
In this sentence, we’re giving a reason, so we need porque = because.
The subject of tienen is frutas from the previous clause:
- El médico recomienda frutas → that’s the noun being talked about.
- porque tienen muchas vitaminas → “because they have many vitamins” → “they” = frutas.
In Spanish, the subject pronoun (ellas here) is usually dropped because the verb ending (-en) already shows that the subject is third person plural.
So you could say porque ellas tienen muchas vitaminas, but it’s normally just porque tienen….
- tener = “to have / to contain / to possess”.
- haber (in the form hay) = “there is / there are”.
Here, the fruits have/contain vitamins and fiber, so tener is correct:
- Las frutas tienen muchas vitaminas.
Fruits have many vitamins.
If you used hay, it would sound like “there are many vitamins,” without clearly linking them to the fruits:
- Hay muchas vitaminas. = There are many vitamins.
We specifically want: the fruits have many vitamins, so tienen is the right choice.
In Spanish, determiners and adjectives agree with the gender and number of the noun:
- vitaminas is feminine plural (la vitamina → las vitaminas).
- mucho must agree with that:
- masculine singular: mucho
- feminine singular: mucha
- masculine plural: muchos
- feminine plural: muchas
So you need muchas vitaminas = many vitamins / a lot of vitamins.
Two different reasons:
vitaminas
Already has a quantifier (muchas). In Spanish, you don’t add an article before a noun with mucho/mucha/muchos/muchas:- tienen muchas vitaminas (not tienen muchas las vitaminas).
fibra natural
Here, fibra is treated as a mass/uncountable noun (like “water,” “sugar”). In general, when mentioning an indefinite amount of a mass noun, Spanish often omits the article:- tienen fibra natural = they have (some) natural fiber.
So: muchas vitaminas y fibra natural is a normal, natural-sounding combination.
In Spanish, the default order is:
- noun + adjective
So:
- fibra natural = natural fiber
- vitaminas importantes = important vitamins
Certain adjectives can go before the noun for special nuances (e.g., buena idea, gran ciudad), but descriptive adjectives like natural, rojo, caro, etc. most often come after the noun.
So fibra natural is the normal order.
Grammatically, natural only modifies fibra, not vitaminas.
Structure:
- muchas vitaminas (many vitamins)
- y
- fibra natural (natural fiber)
If you wanted “natural vitamins and fiber,” you’d have to repeat or restructure:
- vitaminas naturales y fibra natural, or
- vitaminas y fibra naturales (now naturales refers to both).
In the original sentence, only the fiber is described as “natural.”
It could say that, and it would be correct:
- …porque tienen muchas vitaminas y mucha fibra natural.
However, Spanish often drops a repeated word if the meaning is clear from context. Since muchas is already there before vitaminas, many speakers are happy to leave mucha implied before fibra:
- tienen muchas vitaminas y (mucha) fibra natural
This kind of omission (ellipsis) is very common and sounds natural.
The sentence is perfectly natural in any variety of Spanish. A couple of small notes:
- Both médico and doctor are used in Latin America; doctor is extremely common in everyday speech.
- The pronunciation in Latin America for c before o (in médico) is /k/ (like k), not the “th” sound used in much of Spain.
Otherwise, grammar and word choice are standard and widely understood across the Spanish-speaking world.