Is it safe to eat fruits? Or is that too much sugar?
Can a diabetic patient or someone with insulin resistance, or someone with PCOS, or someone who is fat, eat fruit? Usually the question comes to me like this: “When I eat fruit my sugar spikes, so I don’t think I should eat them.”
Perhaps the classic study came from Europe where they found that the intake of vegetables, legumes, and fruits led to a decrease in the risk of death in the diabetic population of Europe. Another study showed that a diet that had a lot of vegetables, legumes and fruits help patients with diabetes lose weight. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15277443/)
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And much to the dismay of the low-carb types a recent study showed that “A higher-protein, low-GI diet for weight maintenance does not attenuate changes in ghrelin or peptide YY compared with a moderate-protein, moderate-GI diet. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33829034/
In fact, when looking at dietary patterns that are healthy for people with diabetes, the Mediterranean and DASH diets came out as having protective effects against incidence of diabetes mellitus and are appropriate for people with insulin resistance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3685790/
Ok but what about progression of diabetes once you get it? The Mediterranean diet has been shown to decrease HbA1c levels compared to other groups, like low fat or low carbohydrate diets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32726990/
When two diets were compared, one that restricted fructose from added sugars and fruit to a diet that kept the fruit- it turns out the fruit diet did better. People lost more weight with the extra fruit present than if all the fruit was restricted. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21621801/
Maybe my favorite study was done when we give people a sugar filled drink and watch what happens. The sugar goes up then in the second hour the sugar plunges. In fact it plunges so much that the body thinks it is starving and sends fat into the bloodstream (this isn’t a good reaction). So lets add more sugar to this and see what happens, but this sugar will be in the form of some blended berries. When they added blended berries to that drink, they found that a lower spike (and keep in mind, we added extra sugar here) and no hypoglycemic dip afterwards. So what happened: fiber is certainly a part of it, but so are the fruit phytonutrients and pheonols that inhibit the transportation of sugars through the wall of the blood stream. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22854401/
If you have apples and strawberries (we live in the strawberry capital of the world) you block the uptake of sugars from your intestine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15757656/
To top the dessert with more berries – it turns out that berries blunt the insulin spike from sugary foods – even white bread. So even though you add more sugar to the mix, you don’t absorb it as well. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23365108/
There is more to fruit than fructose, and there is more to calories than adding up numbers and there is more to carbs than just carbohydrates. Whole fruits are good for you. The more they are incorporated in the diet the less risk you have for developing diabetes, and if you have diabetes the less risk you have for it progressing beyond control.
We teach our patients to have a well-balanced, whole food approach, using the Mediterranean Diet.
Learn more about how Dr. Terry Simpson, bariatric surgeon, can assist you in losing weight, achieve your weight loss goals, and get on the road to better health through weight loss, nutrition and healthy eating. Schedule your free consultation today: 805-620-1000.