Raisins, like all fruits, have a variety of health benefits, but dried fruit is higher in calories per serving than fresh; so, might they contribute to weight gain? A study done by the University of Connecticut helped set people’s minds at ease. Men and women were assigned to consume a cup of raisins a day for six weeks and were able to successfully offset the consumption of other foods in their diets such that they experienced no significant change in weight or waist circumference. What about in kids? I explore that in the video, Are Raisins Good Snacks for Kids?.
Leave it to the California Raisin Marketing Board to dream up a study titled, “An after-school snack of raisins lowers cumulative food intake in young children.” Sounds good, right? They compared raisins to potato chips and chocolate chip cookies. They gave kids raisins, grapes, chips or cookies and said they could eat as much as they wanted and surprise, surprise kids ate less fruit and more junk, but I guess naming the paper “Kids Prefer Cookies” would not have garnered the same kind of sponsor approval.
This reminds me of another study they did showing that regular consumption of raisins may reduce blood sugar levels… compared to fudge cookies and Oreos. Another study showed raisins caused less of a blood sugar spike than Coca-Cola and candy bars. Though you can tell it was not funded by Big Raisin by their conclusion, “whether the general public should be advised to snack on fruit rather than on candy bars requires further debate and investigation.”
Comparing raisins to chips and cookies was similarly unhelpful. Luckily, a less biased study was published by researchers at the University of Toronto. Nine to eleven year old boys and girls were told to eat all the grapes or raisins they wanted 30 minutes before a meal in which they could eat all the pizza they wanted. If you just gave them the meal, no snack, they ate 837 calories worth of pizza. If you gave them all-you-can-eat grapes before the meal, they ate 128 calories of grapes, but that seemed to fill them up a bit; so, they ended up eating less pizza. But because they ate the snack and the meal, they ended up getting more calories over all. Still, grape calories are better than pizza calories, but when given raisins instead, they ate even more snack calories, but the raisins were evidently so satiating that they ate so much less pizza that they ate fewer calories over all.
Now, I know as parents, there’s a concern that if our kids eat snacks it might spoil their dinner, but when the snacks are fruit and the meal is a pepperoni and three cheese pizza, the more we can ruin their appetite, the better.
Raisin marketers aren’t the only ones trying to game the scientific method. Check out:
- The Saturated Fat Studies: Buttering Up the Public
- The Saturated Fat Studies: Set Up to Fail
- BOLD Indeed: Beef Lowers Cholesterol?
- How the Egg Board Designs Misleading Studies
How to help get our kids to eat their fruits and veggies:
- Tricks to Get Kids to Eat Healthier at School
- Tricks to Get Kids to Eat Healthier at Home
- Tricks to Get Adults to Eat Healthier
More dried fruit studies (my fave is dried mango):
- Better Than Goji Berries
- Do Fruit & Nut Bars Cause Weight Gain?
- Dried Apples, Dates, Figs, or Prunes for Cholesterol?
- Garlic and Raisins to Prevent Premature Birth
In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.
PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my free videos here and watch my live, year-in-review presentations—2013: Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death, More Than an Apple a Day, 2014: From Table to Able: Combating Disabling Diseases with Food, 2015: Food as Medicine: Preventing and Treating the Most Dreaded Diseases with Diet, and my latest, 2016: How Not To Die: The Role of Diet in Preventing, Arresting, and Reversing Our Top 15 Killers.
