How many teaspoons of sugar in bitter gourd?

Bitter gourd, also called bitter melon and known as karela in Hindi and Urdu, is the warty green fruit of a vine in the gourd family, cooked as a vegetable across South and South East Asia. Its sharp bitterness is its defining feature, and cooks often salt and squeeze the sliced gourd before frying or stuffing it.

Dr Unwin’s South Asian foods chart lists bitter gourd at 100g with a glycaemic index of 15, the same GI it gives almond-flour roti, and the smallest teaspoon figure on that chart.

Bitter gourd has a long reputation in traditional medicine in South Asia and China as a remedy for high blood sugar, and it has been studied in clinical trials for that reason. The chart makes no claim of that kind. Its figure describes only the glucose effect of the gourd’s own small carbohydrate content, as for any other food, and says nothing about any effect on the response to the rest of a meal.

The chart prints the GI and the teaspoon figure but no glycaemic load. The load on this page was back-calculated from a figure printed to one decimal place, so it is approximate.

Karela is commonly cooked with onions and spices, and some regional recipes add sugar or jaggery to balance the bitterness. Those additions are not part of this figure.

Mango juice, the last row on the same chart, has its own page: mango juice.