Dried fruit: best thing in your bag, worst thing in fight week

Dried fruit sits further apart on this site than any other food. In one phase it is close to the ideal thing to carry. In another it is among the worst things you could eat.

The reason for both is identical, and it is not complicated.

What drying actually does

Fresh fruit is mostly water. A grape is around 80 percent, a plum and an apricot similar.

Drying removes most of it. Raisins end up around 15 percent water, dates around 20.

Nothing is added and nothing is taken away except the water, which means everything else concentrates by roughly 4 to 5 times by weight.

The sugar concentrates. So does the potassium, the iron and the polyphenols. And so does the fibre, which is the part nobody accounts for and the reason the second half of this page exists.

A handful of raisins is several bunches of grapes with the water taken out. It weighs almost nothing and it is not a small amount of food.

The numbers

Read the first and third rows. The same fruit, more than 4 times the calories, from removing water.

Portion blindness is the defining problem with this food. Nobody eats one date. A small handful, eaten without thinking, is 200 calories, and it gets eaten the way people eat something they consider a light snack.

And the surprise: the glycaemic index is not high

Given the sugar concentration you would expect dried fruit to spike blood glucose sharply. It generally does not.

A controlled study of dates, apricots, raisins and sultanas found them all in the low to medium range, and when they replaced half the carbohydrate in white bread, they lowered the glycaemic index of the whole meal.

The reason is the fibre, the organic acids and the polyphenols, all of which slow digestion. Prunes carry sorbitol as well, which slows gastric emptying further.

So dried fruit is concentrated sugar that behaves more moderately than concentrated sugar should. A genuine advantage, and it changes nothing about the calories.

Where it is the best option available

Three situations, and in all three the concentration is the reason.

• Carrying calories with no bulk. For somebody fitting camp around a job, a bag of dates in a pocket solves the gap between a shift and a session, which is the gap where meals get skipped. No refrigeration, no preparation, no container.
• Travel. Dried fruit survives a flight, a hotel room and a foreign kitchen. In an away camp where you do not control the food, a known quantity of carbohydrate in your bag is worth more than the nutritional profile.
• The gap on fight day. When the card runs late and the last proper meal is further away than planned, a few dates with fluid covers a hole a full meal cannot safely fill. The same use described for bananas, in a smaller package, and the same case made under apples.

And where it is the worst

The final 3 to 4 days, and it is worse than most people realise.

The fibre concentrated along with everything else. A hundred grams of dates carries 6.7 grams, which is more than most vegetables and considerably more than any grain on this site by weight.

In the last days fibre is gut content and gut content is weighed with you. Dried fruit is one of the clearest single items to remove.

The label problems

Three things get added to dried fruit and none appear on the front of the packet.

Sulphites, usually sulphur dioxide, used as a preservative and to keep colour bright. They are why conventional dried apricots are orange rather than brown, and concentrations in some products run from hundreds into thousands of parts per million.

For most people this is harmless. For anybody with sulphite sensitivity, and particularly for asthmatics, it is not: sulphite-triggered reactions are documented in a meaningful minority of asthmatics rather than being theoretical.

If you have asthma and dried fruit produces symptoms, this is the likely explanation.

Organic dried fruit is not permitted to use sulphur dioxide, which is why organic apricots are brown. That colour is a sign of what is absent rather than of poor quality.

Added sugar and syrup. Sweetened cranberries and mangoes are common, and some dates are coated in glucose syrup, which is refined sugar added on top of the sugar already there.

The ingredient list should say fruit and nothing else.

Coatings. Raisins are sometimes coated with oil to stop them clumping. Figs are frequently dusted with flour, and where that flour is wheat it matters for coeliac athletes, in the same way described under oats.

Portions, in objects rather than grams

None of those numbers are large in isolation. The problem is that dried fruit is eaten from an open bag while doing something else, and the difference between three dates and eight is 350 calories in a food that registers as a snack.

For a fighter in a deficit, portioning it before it goes in the bag is the intervention. Not willpower, and not avoidance.

Dates against raisins

The two most commonly used, and the differences are small.

Raisins carry slightly more calories, carbohydrate and protein. Dates carry roughly one and a half times the fibre.

For fuelling, raisins are marginally faster and dates marginally more filling. For fight week both are out, and the fibre difference makes dates the worse of the two.

The practical decision is availability and preference. Anybody choosing between them on nutrition is optimising a variable that does not move.

Figs, apricots and prunes

Figs carry more fibre again and a considerable amount of calcium for a fruit, worth knowing for anybody managing bone health without dairy.

Dried apricots are the ones most likely to carry sulphites, for the colour reason above.

Prunes are the outlier. High in sorbitol, well established as an aid to bowel regularity, and therefore useful in exactly the situation where a fighter in camp is struggling with that, and completely wrong in fight week.

Nut and fruit mixes, which are a different food

Trail mix is sold to athletes and needs separating from dried fruit on its own.

Adding nuts adds fat, which roughly doubles the calorie density again. A hundred grams of raisins is around 300 calories. A hundred grams of a nut and fruit mix is commonly 450 to 550.

Not an argument against it. Nuts contribute protein, fat and micronutrients, and the combination is genuinely useful when calories are wanted rather than restricted.

It is an argument for knowing which one is in the bag. A fighter who has substituted trail mix for dried fruit and kept the same handful has increased his intake by half without deciding to.

Chocolate-coated versions, and the ones containing sweetened cranberries or banana chips, are confectionery carrying a health label.

One thing about teeth

A dental point rather than a performance one, and it belongs here rather than anywhere else.

Dried fruit is sticky and sugar-dense, and it adheres to teeth considerably longer than most foods. It ranks among the more cariogenic snacks despite its healthy reputation, and eating it through the day compounds that.

Worth a mention because a dental problem in fight week is a genuine disaster: pain, possible infection, and a course of antibiotics arriving at the worst possible moment.

Rinsing the mouth with water after eating it costs nothing and removes most of the issue.

And the sugar question, honestly

Dried fruit gets attacked as sugar and defended as fruit, and both positions are lazy.

The sugar in it is the sugar that was in the fruit, concentrated. It is not added sugar, and there is no useful sense in which it differs from the sugar in a grape, except that there is far more of it per mouthful.

What comes with it is real: fibre, potassium, polyphenols, and in some cases meaningful iron and calcium. A genuinely better package than a sweet with the same sugar content.

But the calories are the calories. Somebody who replaces confectionery with dried fruit has improved his diet. Somebody who adds dried fruit on top of what he was already eating has added 200 calories a day and gained nothing he could not have had elsewhere.

In a deficit, that distinction is the whole of it.

Where it sits by phase

Same reason both ways

• Understand what drying does. The water left and everything else stayed, including the fibre.
• Best thing in your bag for 11 months, first thing out in the last week. Both for the same reason.
• Weigh it once. A handful is 200 calories and nobody believes that until they see it.
• Read the ingredient list. It should say fruit. If you have asthma and dried fruit disagrees with you, look at the sulphites.
• And prunes are the one to be most careful with in fight week, for a reason that has nothing to do with calories.