Dec 09
14
I’m a New Diabetic … What About Fruit?
Today’s article comes in the form of a question from one of my readers.
“Hello. Thanks for all the great work you’ve been doing to educate us on diabetes. It’s wonderful and I have learned a lot!
My question is about fruit. Now I have been so diligent about removing all the sugar and processed foods from my diet for the past month. There’s not a single cookie, candy bar, Coca Cola, or ice cream bar in the house. And the funny thing is that with all these gone, I don’t even miss them. Not one ioda.
Well, occasionally I still feel that I would like something a little sweet. So I grab an apple or an orange during the day. But lately, I want sweeter fruits. I got a little off track when I was making grape and apricot jam from the fruits off my trees in the backyard. They tasted so good I forgot all about my diet and helped myself. It was like a gorging session.
My question is this: since fruit is natural – you can’t get more natural than picking it off my trees, then is this okay on a diabetic diet?” … Mary
ANSWER:
Dear Mary,
Fruit grown naturally is the way it is supposed to be grown and these fruits are always good foods for a diabetic. But fruit is a carbohydrate food and when you are diabetic, type 1 or type 2, you have to limit the carbohydrates. You can only have 4 or 5 servings a day, and never more than one serving at a time.
Fruit contains the naturally occurring sugar fructose. Years ago, we thought that fructose didn’t cause any problems with blood sugar and was perfectly fine for diabetics. Fructose is metabolized differently than sucrose or glucose.
But the problem is that the fructose can act almost like a free radical in the body. It is a precursor to a compound called AGE’s, which are free radicals with extra special super power to damage cells, organs and tissues. When AGE’s accumulate in your body, they rapidly age you, cause tangled protein masses that are dysfunctional in your brain and damage every possible protein they meet. Now we know that the natural sugar fructose can contribute to causing complications in diabetics.
So your best solution is to keep making the jam, sugarless of course, and don’t pick the fruit unless you have already eaten a meal and aren’t hungry! Stay with the recommendation of only one serving of fruit at any one time and you will be fine.
