The online version of my local paper had an article today titled: "To avoid Type 2 diabetes, choose whole fruit over fruit juice."
The article referenced Harvard researchers, claiming they said that those who ate at least two servings a week of whole fruits - especially apples, grapes and blueberries - reduced their risk for diabetes by as much as 23 percent, compared to those who ate less than one serving per month.
Drinking fruit juice, it said, increased the risk by as much as 21 percent.
I haven't found the study yet, I'm sure it can't be this simplistic. But I can just see "borderline" diabetics out there thinking, "all I have to do to avoid diabetes is eat more fruit."
Here's a link to BBC which isn't as simplistic as the article you read: BBC Their article provides a link to the original paper: PAPER
The limitation of a study like this is that it considers only one component of a diet and tries to control for the rest. That gets complex pretty quickly. On the other hand, I think it is reasonable to conclude that fruit is generally a healthy component of diet, and that it is healthier to eat whole fruit than it is to drink fruit juice (which is basically sugar water).
I've become skeptical if these types of studies, I was a regular consumer of several of the foods said to protect against diabetes pre-diagnosis. That being said I was also a regular consumer of fruit juice pre-diagnosis. Perhaps that explains why I seemingly got no protection from all that brocolli I ate and coffee I drank, both of which studies have said cut the risk of developing T2.
Here's a synopsis from WebMd. Quoting from this article:
"It’s also possible that the people in the study who ate plenty of fruit led more generally healthy lifestyles that made them less likely to get type 2 diabetes. Studies like this one try to allow for things like this in their calculations, but we don’t know how accurate they can really be. So, while these results are interesting, it’s uncertain whether a study like this can show accurately that a specific type of food can have a specific effect on our health."
So as is often the case concerning diabetes, the headlines jump to conclusions that may not be warranted by the actual results of the study.
Yeah, how healthy is someone who eats less than 1 serving of fruit a month? Well, some of Bernstein's followers would be.
That study is a joke.
There was a study out of Australia that examined whether fish oil actually decreased changes of stroke or heart attack. What they ended up discovering, because they kept track of other data, is that there was not a significant result of fish oil vs placebo, but they ended up proving that eating over a certain amount of fiber each day decreases your chances of stroke and heart attack.
You have to read all of these studies with your brain and a grain or two of salt.
