Diabetes is a complicated disease to maneuver around in terms of diet. Especially if you have type 2 diabetes, which requires a little more attention towards your food intake. In terms of fruits, their carbohydrate components are what make them important to consider in your diet.
There are however many beneficial fruits for diabetes that can help you fulfill your body’s need for carbs as well as take care of your cravings for something sweet. This article will answer some FAQs that will help you understand many things regarding diabetes and fruits, how your diet can be most effective among other things.
1. How does diabetes affect your body?
In a diabetic body, a person’s body either stops producing enough insulin or stops responding to the insulin hormone. The insulin hormone helps move glucose from your blood towards your cell and break it into energy. When your body is unable to work with insulin properly, it affects your body’s overall energy levels. It can lead to further complications due to high blood glucose levels in your body.
When energy does not reach your cells properly in type 2 diabetes, your body automatically starts looking for it in alternative organs, tissues, and muscles. The symptoms include constant hunger, frequent urination, blurry vision, fatigue, lack of energy, etc. The most severe consequence of consistently high blood glucose in your body can lead to vision or eye problems, kidney-related issues, gum diseases, and even a stroke or heart attack. In this case, you require an appropriate amount of components that bring you enough energy as well as a proper metabolism.
2. How do fruits affect your blood sugar?
Fruits are rich in carbs including glucose, fructose, and sugar components that need to be navigated to ensure you have enough but not too much. For diabetic patients, you can actively use specific fruits to make sure your blood sugar levels are enough but not too high to affect your body negatively. Some people, however, end up misunderstanding the role fruits can play in your diet if you are diabetic. Almost the entire majority of fruits have tons of minerals, vitamins, and other components that can be beneficial for your diet if you consider and take care of the input and its servings. Fruits also include phytochemicals, which are beneficial and help your body prevent heart disease and the risk of cancer. Utilizing the ingredient component of fruits to benefit your overall health can help you prevent severe diseases.
All you have to make sure while you consume fruits for diabetes is to observe, control, and balance out the components to make sure you only get as much glucose/sugar from fruits as is beneficial to your body. As a diabetic you can easily ensure this by keeping track of the components in fruit, and what servings provide you with enough to get by.
3. What are the top 10 best fruits for diabetes?
The top choices for fruits are one of the most sought-after answers because people want to use the opportunity of eating healthy to nurture their bodies and boost overall physical health. Starting with the most important aspect of fruits is to ensure you eat fresh fruits.
Canned or older stored fruits are not particularly bad for your health, as long as they have no added sugar or preservatives. Most canned products have the ingredients listed on the packaging outside, but at times, sugar could be labeled as something else. Cane sugar, corn syrup, sweetener, dextran are all different synonyms companies use to label sugar on their canned products.
Apart from that, there are some specific names in the fruit kingdom that can help you in particular.
- Blackberries
- Strawberries
- Pears
- Apples
- Cherries
- Oranges
- Peaches
- Grapes
- Grapefruits
- Plums
Many of these above-listed fruits even help people in preventing type 2 diabetes in the first place. However, a lot of what is good or bad for diabetes is made up of the proportions or sizes that you consume a food in. Another component to keep in mind with fruits is the GI or glycemic index of a fruit, which is the rate at which it affects your blood sugar.
A fruit having a higher GI raises the blood sugar quickly while fruits with lower GI raise it slowly. For most of the time, it’s better to consume fruits with a lower glycemic index to ensure steady blood sugar, but if you are low on it, it might serve you well to get your hands on a high GI fruit. A big serving of low GI fruit will be equal to a small serving of a high GI fruit, it all depends on your proportions. Apples, Oranges, Dates, and Bananas are examples of low GI fruits, while Watermelons and Pineapples are examples of high GI fruits.
4. What to consider for a beneficial fruit intake?
There are a few aspects you need to consider with fruits, in addition to their internal components. Here are a few things you should consider when you think about fruits for diabetes.
- Considering the size or portion of fruit about its ingredients is important when you include them in your diet
- Fresh fruits should be preferred over canned, processed, dried, or frozen fruits
- Fruit juice can amp up the blood sugar levels quickly as it does not have fiber in the middle as fruits do, to slow down the digestion process, therefore, when going for fruit juice, keep the serving highly controlled
People with diabetes already have plenty of restrictions in their diet, including fruits to mitigate the disease can be fun if done properly. Create a small meal plan for yourself and use the basics of fruits for diabetes instructions to help you out.
