● Food Intelligence · Fruit
Across 19,648 logged cherry meals from 5,926 Signos members, the average glucose peak was +34.2 mg/dL — modest for a sweet fruit, and lower than apple (+31.5 mg/dL) only when paired carefully. Light-carb cherry meals held at +30.6 mg/dL, while very-heavy-carb builds (110g+) pushed to +50.5 mg/dL — a 65% escalation driven entirely by what's on the plate alongside the fruit.
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Modestly — averaging +34.2 mg/dL across 19,648 logged meals, with the lowest glycemic load (GL=3) of any sweet fruit in the atlas. Cherries have a published GI of 22 and a glycemic load of just 3 — meaning a typical serving contributes very little carb load on its own. The 19,648-meal cohort averaged +34.2 mg/dL with a median of +31 mg/dL, and 28.8% of responses landed in the low-spike tier. Cherries eaten alone averaged +31.8 mg/dL (n=4,963 single-item logs). The dominant lever isn't the fruit — it's what arrives with it: cherries in a smoothie averaged +29.7 mg/dL, on yogurt +30.8 mg/dL, while in cake or cobbler the average climbed to +40.8 mg/dL. Total meal carb load matters most: very-heavy-carb cherry meals (110g+) peak at +50.5 mg/dL, a 65% escalation over light-carb builds.
Some members spike +30.6 mg/dL. Others spike +50.5. The only way to know how you'll spike is to measure with a Signos CGM.
Cherries are a low-glycemic-load fruit (GI=22, GL=3) — a 1-cup serving contains roughly 22g of carbs, of which 3g count as net glycemic load thanks to fiber, polyphenols, and a sugar profile dominated by fructose rather than glucose. The 19,648-meal cohort averaged +34.2 mg/dL, but the modifier table tells a clear story: meal-level carb load is the dominant driver. Meals with ≥60g of total carbs ran 46% higher than the low-carb baseline (p<0.001), and the carb-bucket analysis shows a near-linear escalation from +30.6 mg/dL in light meals to +50.5 mg/dL in very-heavy (110g+) meals — a 65% jump. High-sugar pairings (≥20g) drove the largest single modifier at +50% (n=7,090, p<0.001). Two secondary effects pull the response down: morning timing trimmed peaks by ~9% and high baseline glucose (≥110 mg/dL) showed a ~10% lower response — both highly significant. The mechanism is observational, but the pattern is consistent with cherries' low intrinsic glycemic potential being amplified or buffered entirely by meal context.
This page draws on 19,648 cherry logs from 5,926 unique Signos members, including 4,963 single-item logs (cherries eaten alone with no co-logged pairings) and 13,082 alone-baseline logs used as the reference point for carb-pair deltas. Data were collected through the Signos production CGM platform and filtered to postprandial glucose responses (PPGR) between 0 and 100 mg/dL to exclude sensor artifacts and implausible readings. Modifier effects were estimated using Welch's t-test on matched pairs against a defined baseline; all reported effects carry p<0.001 unless noted. We report mean glucose peak across a right-skewed distribution — the median single-item spike of +28 mg/dL is a few mg/dL lower than the mean of +31.8 mg/dL, which is typical for this type of data. The food was identified using a regex matching "cherry" or "cherries" as a primary ingredient, with explicit exclusions for cherry tomatoes, maraschino cherries, cherry liqueurs, and compound dishes where cherries were a minor component (cherry pie, cherry sauce, cherry syrup). Any carb-pair slot requires at least 100 matched meals before it appears in the recipe builder.