New Research Shows Eating Whole Fruit Reduces Type 2 Risk

2 Sep 2013 --- Research published in the British Medical Journal today into whether certain fruits impact on Type 2 diabetes suggests that eating blueberries, grapes, apples, pears, raisins and prunes cuts the risk of Type 2 diabetes, while drinking fruit juice slightly increases it. This could be due to the high glycaemic load of fruit juice and the reduction of beneficial nutrients through the juicing process.

Dr Matthew Hobbs, Head of Research for Diabetes UK, said: “The best way to reduce your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes is to eat a balanced, healthy diet that includes a variety of fruits and vegetables and to be as physically active as possible. This research provides further evidence that eating plenty of whole fruit is a key part of the balanced diet that will help you to achieve a healthy weight and so minimise your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

“However, the associations between Type 2 diabetes and specific types or fruit or fruit drinks must be treated with much more caution. Some of the findings are based on a number of assumptions and models which may have distorted the results significantly. For example, the researchers used surveys to ask participants how often they ate certain foods. This type of survey can often be unreliable as people are more likely to remember certain types of food. In fact, the researchers tried to adjust for this by asking a small subset of participants to complete daily food diaries and comparing the results to the surveys. For a number of fruits, including blueberries, the numbers were not big enough to allow the researchers to correct their findings in this way.”