Could Fresh Fruit Consumption Lower Diabetes Risk?

Higher consumption of fresh fruit is linked to lower risk of diabetes, as well as lower risk of death and major vascular complications among individuals with diabetes, according to a recent study.

In order to explore the impact of fresh fruit consumption on incident diabetes and outcomes in patients with diabetes, researchers conducted a study of 482,591 individuals without diabetes and 30,300 with diabetes, recruited from the nationwide China Kadoorie Biobank study.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RELATED CONTENT
Fruits and Vegetables Might Reduce Psychological Distress in Older Women
Study: Giving Young Adults Fruit and Vegetable Improves Their Psychological Health
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

During approximately 7 years of follow-up, 9504 new cases of diabetes were recorded, with an overall incidence rate of 2.8 per 1000 person-years, and among those with diabetes at baseline,  3389 deaths, 9746 cases of macrovascular disease, and 1345 cases of microvascular disease occurred. The researchers used Cox regression models to analyze correlations between self-reported consumption of fresh fruit and disease outcomes.

Overall, 18.8% of participants reported consuming fresh fruit daily, and 6.4% reported never or rarely consuming fresh fruit. Individuals previously diagnosed with diabetes were about 3 times as likely to not consume fruit than those without diabetes than those with screen-detected diabetes or no diabetes.

Among individuals without diabetes at baseline, higher fresh fruit consumption was associated with a significantly lower risk of developing diabetes (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 0.88) compared with those who rarely consumed fruit.

Among those with diabetes at baseline, higher fruit consumption was associated with lower risk of all-cause mortality (adjusted HR 0.83) and microvascular (HR 0.72) and macrovascular (HR 0.87) complications.

“To our knowledge, this is the first large prospective study demonstrating similar inverse associations of fruit consumption with both incident diabetes and diabetic complications,” the researchers wrote.

“These findings suggest that a higher intake of fresh fruit is potentially beneficial for primary and secondary prevention of diabetes. For individuals who have already developed diabetes, restricted consumption of fresh fruit, which is common in many parts of the world, eg, China and other Asian countries, should not be encouraged,” they concluded.

—Michael Potts

Reference:

Du H, Li L, Bennett D, et al. Fresh fruit consumption in relation to incident diabetes and diabetic vascular complications: A 7-y prospective study of 0.5 million Chinese adults [published online April 11, 2017]. PLOS Med. doi: doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002279.