Grape

Grape salicylate sits mostly in the skin, so dark grapes run higher than pale ones and raisins higher still. Peeling is impractical here — quantity is the workable lever.

Grape is low with a qualification worth knowing: balanced sugars, and one of the few fruits with no excess fructose. Fruit is where this axis is least intuitive, because sweetness and FODMAP load are not the same measurement - what counts is the balance between the sugars, not how much sugar there is.

The table grape is eaten fresh - wine, raisins and juice are what time and process make of it.

Grapes carry about 8 g of fructose per 100 g, which is not a small amount - but they carry 7 g of glucose alongside it, and that is what decides this axis. Fructose is absorbed by co-transport with glucose, so what fails to be absorbed is the fructose IN EXCESS, and the excess here is under a gram. It is the same reason raisins and sultanas read none: drying multiplies both sugars equally and cannot create an imbalance that was not there. Anyone avoiding fructose by total intake rather than by ratio should read the 8 g, not the level.

Grape came out the lowest of the five fruits Nie measured for nickel, which is the one place in that study where a fruit is named at an end of the ranking rather than left in the middle. Lead, cadmium, chromium and nickel were measured across China's main growing areas; nickel led the four, and the five fruits together supply no more than 1.1 per cent of the tolerable daily intake.