It’s a pretty bold statement, right?
Fruit is the best food for diabetics. I know, it’s a bit shocking.
But it’s true.
Everyone is so quick to demonize fruit, but nobody takes the time to fact check that fruit is bad. The truth is that nobody has ever been able to prove that fruit is bad for diabetics (or really bad at all).
In fact, St. Louis-based registered dietitian Alexandra Caspero says that among all of her patients that seek weight-loss advice and treatment, “fruit is rarely the culprit.”
Not convinced that fruit is also no culprit of diabetes?
A study published in Nutrition Journal in 2013 reported that participants with type 2 diabetes showed absolutely no changes to their blood glucose levels, waist circumferences or weights when they decreased their fruit intakes.
It’s weird, right? You would think that lowering your fruit intake, especially as a diabetic, would at the very least help stabilize blood glucose.
But it doesn’t.
Because fruit has no major effect on blood glucose.
Did you know that fruit isn’t even molecularly similar to the kind of sugar that you add to your coffee or oatmeal? Fruit is made up mostly of fructose while table sugar is a combination of both glucose and fructose. In the case of table sugar, glucose is given a direct line to your blood by bypassing all of the great qualities that fruit would otherwise offer.
And fruit has a lot of qualities.
First, whole fruit is loaded with fiber, which helps slow down the digestive process. It takes a little bit more effort to process, so the sugar content in fruit is absorbed into the blood at a much slower, more manageable rate.
Next, fruit is full of vitamins and minerals, many of which are difficult to get from any 
other source of food. These vitamins and minerals help your body function at full capacity and fight off damaging free radicals (the things that break down your healthy cells, make you age, and develop cancer).
Honestly, who wouldn’t want that in their diet?
Fruit is so good at fighting off free radicals that, according to one massive study with 65,000 participants, people who ate seven or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day had a 42% lower risk of dying during the follow-up than those who ate less than one full serving a day.
Okay, but what about those people that take fruit too far?
They’re okay, too! Another study followed people that ate more than a whopping 20 servings of fruit per day for two weeks revealed that there were absolutely no adverse effects whatsoever.
So, as a diabetic or as a person with stellar insulin functioning, the advice is the same: load up on fruits and veggies.
If you’re still nervous, don’t worry: there are a ton of studies that say that fruit can help reverse diabetes. Don’t believe it? Check out our articles on mangos, blueberries, and more.
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US News. URL Link. Accessed April 3, 2017.
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