Tips & Tricks

Every apple in the shop is a low-glycemic-load food. A medium one lands around GL 6, and the spread across varieties is a point or two either side of that.

Which makes the interesting question not which apple but everything else: how big it is, whether you peel it, and what happens to it before it reaches you.

The varieties, roughly ranked

Sugar content per medium fruit is the main difference between them, and it tracks how sweet they taste:

• Granny Smith: around 16 g sugar, the tartest of the common varieties. Lowest of the group.
• Braeburn, Pink Lady: 17–18 g, sharp-sweet.
• Gala, Golden Delicious: around 18–19 g.
• Fuji, Honeycrisp: 19–21 g, and the sweetest of the mainstream varieties.

Glycemic index across all of them sits in the low-to-mid thirties, which is genuinely low. The difference between the tartest and the sweetest apple works out to about two grams of available carbohydrate — roughly a teaspoon.

So if you prefer Honeycrisp, eat Honeycrisp.

Size is the real variable

Apples have grown. A large modern apple can hold half again as much carbohydrate as a small one, and supermarket apples skew large because that's what sells.

A small apple, about the size of a tennis ball, is roughly GL 4. A large one, the size you'd have to open your hand fully to hold, is closer to GL 9. That's more than double the spread between the tartest and sweetest varieties.

If you're counting, the size of the fruit in your hand tells you more than the label on the crate.

Keep the skin on

The skin holds a large share of the apple's fibre and most of its polyphenols, including quercetin. Peeling removes some of the fibre that slows sugar absorption and most of the compounds that make apples interesting beyond their carbohydrate content.

There's reasonable evidence that apple polyphenols modestly inhibit carbohydrate-digesting enzymes, which would slow absorption further. That's a small mechanism, not a claim worth building anything on, but it's a reason to eat the skin rather than another reason to buy a supplement.

What processing does to the number

This is where apples go from reliably low to something else entirely:

• Whole apple, medium: GL around 6
• Unsweetened apple sauce, half cup: GL around 7, with much of the fibre broken down
• Sweetened apple sauce, half cup: GL around 12
• Apple juice, 250 ml: GL around 12, no fibre at all
• Dried apple rings, a small handful: GL around 10 in a portion you'd finish in a minute
• A slice of apple pie: GL around 25, mostly from the pastry and added sugar

The apple itself was never the problem in any of these. What gets removed and what gets added on the way is.

Cider, briefly

Sweet cider — the unfermented kind — is apple juice with a seasonal name, at similar carbohydrate.

Hard cider varies enormously. Dry ciders can be as low as 2 to 5 g of carbohydrate per serving; sweet commercial ones run 15 to 25 g. The label is the only way to tell, and the alcohol brings the delayed-low consideration that applies to any drink.

Getting more out of the apple you're already eating

Pair it with fat or protein. An apple with a spoon of peanut butter or a piece of cheese produces a flatter curve than the apple alone, and it turns a snack that lasts twenty minutes into one that lasts two hours.

Eat it cold and whole. Slicing an apple in advance makes it easier to eat quickly and, oddly, less satisfying — the chewing is part of what makes fruit filling.

Use it in savoury cooking. Apple in a cabbage braise, in a pork dish, or thinly sliced into a salad with sharp cheese brings sweetness to a meal without a dessert appearing.

Where apples sit against other fruit

Apples are frequently recommended as a good fruit choice for blood sugar, and the ranking supports it without making them exceptional.

Berries are lower — a cup of strawberries or raspberries lands around GL 4 with more fibre per gram of carbohydrate than anything else in the fruit aisle. Pears sit almost exactly where apples do. Oranges are similar. Grapes are roughly double per cup, and bananas run 11 to 14 depending on ripeness.

So an apple is a good default rather than a special case. The reason it gets recommended so often is probably as much about convenience as chemistry: it needs no preparation, survives a bag, and comes in its own packaging.

Orchard season

Apple picking has a specific failure mode: you come home with fifteen kilos of apples and turn most of them into pie, crumble and sauce, because that's what you do with a glut.

The lower-GL options for a glut are worth knowing. Apples freeze well sliced, for later cooking. They keep for months in a cold garage or shed in a single layer. They roast alongside pork or squash. Baked whole with cinnamon and a spoon of yogurt, they're a dessert at around GL 8 rather than the 25 the crumble version costs.

And the varieties that store best — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Fuji — happen to be the tarter ones near the bottom of the ranking, which is a convenient coincidence for anyone planning to eat them over a couple of months.

One last note on the ones that don't store. Bruised and soft apples are the ones that get cooked, and cooking is where sugar tends to get added. A bruised apple is perfectly good grated into porridge or roasted whole, and neither of those needs a spoonful of anything.