Fresh Fruit Consumption Can Diminish Diabetes Risk and Its Complications

Fresh fruit consumption can lower the occurrence of diabetes and reduce the complications in diabetic people, says a study. Huaidong Du of the University of Oxford and his colleagues found that higher consumption of fresh fruits lower the diabetes risk in Chinese population.

The research team investigated about 500,000 people involving in the China Kadoorie Biobank for more than 7 years of follow-up, while also recording new diabetic patients and documenting the incidents of vascular disease and death in pre-existing diabetic people.

Fresh Fruit and Diabetes Risk Connection

The results showed that people who consumed fresh fruit had a lower risk of developing diabetes when compared to others. There was 0.2% decrease in the absolute diabetes risk over 5 years.

In diabetic people who consumed fresh fruit was linked with a lower risk of death, which corresponds to an absolute decrease in risk by 1.9% over 5 years and with reduced risks of macrovascular and microvascular complications.

Besides the health effects of consuming fresh fruit, researchers highlight the value of their results for diabetic Asian population. The major drawback of this observational study is that impacts of fruit consumption may be hard to differentiate from those participants' other behavioural and dietary characteristics.

Written by: Lax Mariappan, Msc