Fruit Sugar Rankings - for Healthy Blood-Sugar Levels

Sugar can give you a short-term energy boost and mental high, only to soon drop you down hard like the gut-wrenching dive on a roller-coaster ride. For those with hypoglycemia, hyperglycemia, or the more serious diabetes mellitus, it can make life a lot easier to avoid the spikes and crashes in energy and the mood-coaster that excess sugar intake can cause. For people with sensitivity to wavering blood-sugar levels, it's usually beneficial to avoid eating very sweet foods alone routinely. This doesn't just relate to refined sugars like sucrose. The natural fructose - or fruit sugars - that we taste in fruits can trip that sugar-trigger as well. And since fruits are often eaten alone as tide-me-over snacks, the higher the dose of natural fruit sugar, the more intense your blood-sugar level may swing after eating fruit alone.

So what fruits have the most sugar? The percentages listed below are approximations based on the fruit type, in general, at the point of ripeness each is at when sold as fresh. Content can vary within a type of fruit. Two grapes on the same stem can have slightly different sugar content levels depending on ripeness and other factors. Even the same piece of fruit will develop greater sugar content as it ripens and then over-ripens.

Listed below are many commonly sold fruits, ranked in order from highest percentage of sugar content (on top) to lowest percentage. These estimations exclude the parts of the fruits that are wasted and not eaten (such as stems and rinds) - so among the parts that we would eat, listed below are the estimated percentages that are comprised of sugar:

Date - 63.0% (Dried fruits are generally much higher in sugars)

Common fig (dried) - 47.9%

Ugli fruit - 17.8% (I had to include this for the love of the name)

Guava - 17.0%

Pomegranate - 16.6%

Grape - 15.5% (Dried grape, a.k.a. raisin, is 59% sugar)

Mango - 14.8%

Cherry - 13.0%

Persimmon - 12.5%

Banana - 12.2%

Pear - 11.5%

Passion Fruit - 11.2%

Tangerine - 10.8%

Mandarin - 10.6% (Reddish-orange ones are sold as tangerines)

Apple - 10.4%

Blueberry - 9.9%

Plum - 9.9%

Pineapple - 9.3%

Clementine orange - 9.2%

Navel orange - 9.1%

Apricot - 9.0%

Kiwifruit (gooseberry) - 9.0%

Peach - 8.4%

Honeydew melon - 8.0%

Cantaloupe - 7.9%

Mulberry - 7.9%

Nectarine - 7.7%

Grapefruit - 7.3%

Watermelon - 6.2%

Coconut - 6.2%

Papaya - 5.9%

Raspberry - 5.4%

Carrot - 5.0%

Blackberry - 4.9% (Many cultivars, or varieties: marion, chehalem, olalli)

Strawberry - 4.8%

Cranberry - 4.0%

Olive - 3.0%

Tomato - 2.6%

Lemon - 2.5%

Bell Pepper - 2.4%

Lime - 1.7%

Rhubarb - 1.1%

Avocado - 0.7%

I don't know about your taste buds - since we all have very different numbers of taste receptors on our tongues - but for me, this demonstrates that I can pretty much trust my buds. If it tastes really sweet to me (like a grape), it has a lot more sugar than if it doesn't taste sweet (like an avocado). So you probably don't need to sweat the percentages, just mind your tongue.

Most of us don't eat nearly enough fresh fruits regularly. But when you do eat fruit snacks, it is wise to know which fruits can swing your blood-sugar and health around more dramatically.

I'm going to go suck on a lime.

Fruit Sugar Rankings - for Healthy Blood-Sugar Levels by Iggy Sarducci is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.