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Fruit

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Cheryl

Well-Known Member
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I eat a lot of fruit. I have a question about carbohydrate values in my fruit. Should I calculate the carb value including core/skin or excluding it?

For example, apple has 10g carb per 100g, but is that a 100g apple or 100g of apple flesh? The apple core that I throw away weighs about 20g. So does my 100g apple contain 10g of carb or 8 g of carb? :?

This may seem like splitting hairs, but when you add up 3 or 4 pieces of fruit it makes the difference of at least a unit of insulin to me and the difference between hypo & high later in the day. All the dietician said was, "it's not enough to matter". I didn't find that helpful as she didn't give me the opportunity to come back to her with the fact that it can be 10g carb either way once you add up a pear, apple and a couple of satsumas at lunch time. :x

Equally, I eat a banana before I swim. I was surprised to weigh a banana peel & discover that it was almost 30% of the total weight of the banana (130g ttal banana, 40g of peel). So, when I calculate my carbohydrate replacement for exercise, does my 150g banana with its skin on have 34g carb (at 23g/100g) or does it have nearer 23g of carb if the skin is 30% of its total weight? This makes the difference between half a bottle of lucozade during my swim & a whole one. roblem:

Can anyone assist? Most sites that I have looked at don't say whether the values they use when referring to whole fruit include the core/skin or not.
 
Hi Cheryl, if you eat 80g of apple that is the figure you should factor in, the apples I eat are generally granny smiths which are 11.9g pre 100g not the lowest but I like em

So work with what you eat not what the fruit starts out as :thumbup:
 
I don't think there is a definitive answer to this. If you compare nutritional tables you find huge variations between the quantities of carbs in fruit, and as you say, they don't usually specify whether they are talking about the gross or the net weight. I have come to the conclusion that I just have to use my meter to guide me in how much insulin to use. I've ALWAYS found that using my normal ratios with the carb values given in tables for fruit results in an insulin overdose - perhaps this is due to the core/skin etc but the effect is more than this so I think that fruit have to be treated differently from other carbs. I also eat a lot of fruit, btw.
 
The official UK tables of nutrients are for the edible portion of the foods.
I believe that some of the UK online tables like this one
http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/ca ... /fruit.htm
and also the book ' Calorie Fat and Carb bible' use UK official data. (not sure of the source of the data in the Gem book)
You can actually download the data yourself but it is not the latest edition and isn't that easy to use.
http://tna.europarchive.org/20110116113 ... etsurveys/


I found this from the FSA. 'Calculation of nutrient contents for foods 'as purchased' or 'as served'
http://www.ukfoodcomposition.org/As_Ser ... tions.html

It just so happens to give examples using bananas and apples!



Apples have an average of 11.5 g per 100g carb The edible portion is estimated to be .89
So if you weigh it with the core there will be about 10.5 g carb per 100g eaten (11.5 x .89)

Banana flesh has 23.2 g per 100g carb.. The edible portion is estimated to be .66 of the whole banana
So if you weigh it skin and all then there are 15.3 g carbs per 100g of edible portion. (23.3x.66)

so practically there isn't much difference between the edible portion and a whole apple but it would make a significant difference if you calculated your carbs from the weight of a banana with the skin on.

I suppose you could do your own trials and work out what proportion of the fruit you normally eat and then use that figure as a mutiplier every time you eat that fruit. Seems a lot of faff though !
 
For most people the difference is pretty negligible so doesn't make a difference. But for an odd few who are particularly sensitive to insulin it can make a real difference...

I think that all you can do, is do a trail and compare the results, so how it effects you individually..

It's a similar to the 'round up or down' question when faced with a carb value that doesn't match insulin unit.. Some people find that if they have 12g's of carbs, and their insulin/carb ratio is 1u/10g's they don't notice the 2g's extra other such as myself it would make a great difference..
 
Edible bits only i would say. it does of course depend on what the nutrional values take account of but i am willing to bet it is just a meausre done per 100g of the product not per 100g based on having chucked away 20g and being left with 80g.
 
Fruits should be preferably taken in the morning, this helps in detoxification and also aids in weight loss. Although these benefits can be availed by having fruits anytime during the day, morning is said to be the ideal time for having fruits.
 
You calculate on the basis of what you eat so you can discount those bits that you throw away.

However, many of these published figures are only accurate for the foods that they tested. Bananas for example are variable and depend on ripeness. In addition, bananas contain both digestible and non digestible carbohydrates and the amounts of each depend on how ripe the banana is when you eat it. The figures are only guides and not terribly accurate. But, that doesn't matter because, as long as you stick to the same method, whether accurate or inaccurate, you will get consistent results. They'll just be skewed one way or the other.

No one except ambitious PhD students get invovled with this sort of level:

"Digestion of the carbohydrates of banana (Musa paradisiaca sapientum) in the human small intestine.

The digestion and absorption from the small bowel of the carbohydrate of banana has been studied by feeding ileostomy subjects banana from six batches of different ripeness and measuring the amounts excreted in the effluent. Starch content of bananas depended on the ripeness being 37% of dry weight in the least ripe and 3% in the most ripe. Excretion of carbohydrate from banana in ileostomy effluent ranged from 4-19 g/day and was directly related to the starch content (r = 0.99). Up to 90% of the starch could be accounted for in the effluent. Complete recovery of nonstarch polysaccharides [NSP (dietary fiber)] was obtained. The amount of banana starch not hydrolyzed and absorbed from the human small intestine and therefore passing into the colon may be up to 8 times more than the NSP present in this food and depends on the state of ripeness when the fruit is eaten. "

One can take these things too seriously.
 
One of the questions I asked the dietician was about fruits. I asked her if the ripeness of the fruit, any kind of fruit, would influence the level of sugar in my blood and she said yes, that it definitively would. Therefore, I try to eat fruits that are note quite ripe to limit the amount of sugar I am ingesting, and still benefit of all the vitamins found in fruits. I manage to eat fruits between meals as a snack, and almost always accompanied with a piece of cheese or ham (proteins help slow down the release of sugar in the blood).
 
Trunin said:
accompanied with a piece of cheese or ham (proteins help slow down the release of sugar in the blood).
Click to expand...

Melon, cheese and ham, puts me in the mood for something italian
 
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