Are fruits good for breakfast?

I may have said this earlier but its worth repeating. In my experience, fruits were not quite neutral to my sugar control when I had them for breakfast. And I experimented with quite a few of them.

First, let's take citrus. Orange, grapefruit, tangerine, etc.. will cause blood sugar to rise significantly. In fact, one of the first things Atkins dieters cut out is orange juice at breakfast. Doesn't matter if the juice is Tropicana or Florida's Own "Not from concentrate" or the frozen, canned Minute Maid "Mix your own juice" kinds. I even had a juicer so that I could squeeze juice out of oranges myself. Didn't work.

Bad news? In a way. Orange juice is a staple for breakfast. But in my case, a no-no. So I stay away from O.J. or grapefruit juice or any other kind of citrus fruit juice.

Next came berries. There is a little bit of good news here. Based on the glycemic index, berries are better. And strawberries are the best among them.

For a while I ate blueberries in the morning. Not so good for the glucometer reading after breakfast. Then I switched to strawberries. Better numbers on the glucometer but still not quite the containment I was looking for. My goal was to not exceed 30-35 mg/dl in the increase after breakfast.

And here was another critical metric. It turned out that my A1C number decreased when I stopped eating strawberries. Then I found out that the sugar contained in fruits, which is called fructose, is more impactful on blood than other sugars. And not in a good way. Apparently, fructose binds to the red blood cells for longer times than any other kind of sugar. Which is what leads to higher A1C.

Didn't matter to me what the science was. All I knew was that my A1C was lower without strawberries. So I gave it up as a regular breakfast item. Once in a while, I eat them when the mood hits me. But only sparingly.