There are far too many "rules" about eating. Provided you eat a healthy balanced diet you will be fine. If you want to find out whether eating fruit at the "wrong" time causes problems for you, then try it and see if you suffer any ill effects.

I agree, way too many rules and none of them seem to apply to the everyday person. I think that if you have an apple in your hand and you feel like eatting an apple then how recently you last ate should make no difference.

But don't do something just to see if the person that told you about it was wrong. (Never give Petethebloke a big red button that says "End of the world button, do not press")

Gronk...! Much ado about fruiting and nutting IMO.

Much of my life I have eaten fruit, fresh or prepared,  before during or after meals or apart from meals, either at individual times or in various combinations, and I can't say I have noticed much difference, or much bloating at all.  I would expect that anyone prone to bloating might expect more abrupt bloating if he filled himself before a meal, because he would thereby feed his gut flora with a concentrated flood of sugars, particularly fructose, and various less digestable substances that get absorbed slowly or get assimilated poorly, and thereby get fermented, producing CO2 etc.

Conversely, if he eats the fruit on a full stomach, the juice gets incorporated into a more viscous chyme so that the bubbles cannot escape so easily; that might cause a different form of bloating.

For my money it hardly makes much difference, as long as you eat in moderation, and have a functional metabolism. If not, all bets are off. For example, if you lack lactase, milk will bloat you, otherwise not. If you constantly eat cooked dried beans you will hardly notice anything special, but if you seldom do, your gut flora will ferment their stachyose and raffinose to the pleasure of your audience.

 Is it best to eat fruit before or after a meal?

Instead of a meal.....is best.

This was a joke in my youth, wenn family planning

was not generally used:

Doctor to a woman asking how to avoid another 

pregnancy:

Eat an apple!

Woman:

Before or after?

Doctor:

Instead of, instead!

the best thing is eat fruit after meal