Q & A Thursday: can you eat too much fruit?

Posted by kathryn in Fruit and Q & A Thursday

Another reader has asked about fruit: how much is too much and can eating fruit increase your risk of diabetes?

How much fruit should you eat?

Here in Australia the dietary guidelines recommend two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables every day.

Both are important to your health as they provide vitamins, minerals, fibre and antioxidants.

While fruit and vegetables are rich in nutrients, fruit also contains more kilojoules. So eating more than two serves of fruit a day is okay as long as you’re at a healthy weight and you’re eating the other food groups you need to maintain good health.

If you’re not within your healthy weight range, or you’re eating fruit at the expense of other food groups, then I would advise cutting back. Because you need to re-balance your diet.

Does eating a lot of fruit increase your risk of diabetes?

The risk factors for Type II diabetes are many and varied. It is a complex condition. A high fruit diet is not a risk factor for Type II diabetes. While fruit contains “sugars”, most of it has a low GI and does not contribute to the disordered blood sugar response seen in Type II diabetes.

The primary dietary and lifestyle risk factors for Type II are:

• A high fat diet, particuarly high saturated and trans fats
• Excessive alcohol intake
• Being overweight or obese
• Including a lot of high GI foods in your diet
• Not exercising
• Smoking

There is no one single food or even food group which causes Type II diabetes.

Some more information can be found at the GI News site.

What is Q & A Thursday?

This post is part of Q & A Thursday – a monthly burst of blogging, where you get to dictate the subject matter. Q & A Thursday is all about simple, practical answers to food and diet dilemmas sent in by readers.

If you have a question you’d like answered send me an email. For more information you can take a look at the Q & A Thursday archives.

03 July, 2008