Ask the experts: Canned fruit

Q: My family like to eat canned fruit on their breakfast cereal and the fruit in lite juice is so much more expensive than the fruit in syrup. Would it be healthy to buy the syrup fruit and wash it all off before eating? Does the fruit absorb the extra sugars in the can? Thanks!

Justine

A: HFG senior nutritionist Rose Carr responds:

Canned fruit is a convenient way to add fruit to your day and while fruit is sweet enough by itself, a lot of the canned fruit we can buy is in a sugar syrup.

If the lower sugar products are too expensive, just drain the fruit well. As you suggest, briefly washing the excess syrup off would be a quick way to achieve this. The fruit will have absorbed some of the sugar from the syrup but draining the syrup will make a big difference. For example, a cup of canned peaches in syrup has around 990kJ but when drained that’s down to around 470kJ.

At the end of the day, eating any canned fruit is better than not eating fruit.