Sugar from fruit

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  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
    earlnabby wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »

    I think I should've made my main point more explicit, too: I think it's much more useful to worry about getting the right things into my eating, than it is to worry about getting less-useful things out.

    This is how I think about sugar too. As a diabetic I have slightly different goals but the main one is to stay under 150 g of total carbs per day. Whether those carbs come from simple (sugars) or complex (starches) has little effect on my blood glucose overall. Simple carbs will cause a spike and crash while complex carbs will cause a more gentle rise and fall but over a longer period of time. The AVERAGE over the day will be the same.

    This fits into your point in that I have a limited budget for carbs so I need to spend them in a way that gets the most nutrition in, instead of just keeping sugar out. Eating a high sugary treat or drinking juice or a regular soda does not do that so they need to be limited, but not because of the sugar. I eat more veggies and less fruit for the same reason. I look for carbs that have fiber because it is harder to get enough fiber when reducing carbs.

    I don't track sugar because, in the end, it is a meaningless number for me.
    While we’re somewhat off the original topic, I wanted to comment on this. While most doctors are primarily focused on a1c, since it’s an easily administered test which gives a estimate of average blood sugar over about ninety days, research has found that a1c has limited correlation to serious side effects of diabetes, while high spikes after meals and fluctuations have a much stronger correlation with serious side effects. If your sugar is repeatedly very high and crashes, resulting in the same average sugar over time as if it stayed within normal ranges, that is NOT the same for your health. It damages nerves and in particular it leads to cardiovascular events, the main cause of death for diabetics.

    However, I still agree that tracking sugar isn’t that important because sugar isn’t the only thing that causes spikes. High starch foods such as tortillas spike the heck out of me, and so does white rice, while oranges, high in sugar but also in fiber, don’t spike me.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,053 Member
    donnadean3337 wrote: »
    This is just the question I was going to ask - glad I searched the forum first!

    My understanding is that sugar from fruit is less bad than refined sugar because your body has to work harder to break down and digest the raw fruit.

    A few responses suggest swapping out the sugar count for fibre - is this done on the app or do people mean to just ignore the sugar total and take more notice of the fibre?

    Thanks

    I do it here: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings but that's for desktop; not sure if it would be the same in the app on mobile.

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