‘Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb that’s where the fruit is: FATHER ANDREW SDC
If you scored higher than 40 on the Fruits and Vegetables portion of the questionnaire, then you may very well be what I call a Vegecarian, and that’s wonderful. Fruits and vegetables are good for you and should be at the heart of just about any diet. This is one of the few things most nutrition buffs and diet docs agree on.
Fruits and Vegetables: The Good News:
Your mother has been harping on about the benefits of fruits and veggies since you were a kid, so you may not think it’s possible for me to come up with any new information on this front. Let me give it a shot.
Fruits and vegetables are a low-calorie, high-nutrient-value food. A diet high in fruits and vegetables will promote weight loss, because these foods contain plenty of water and not so many calories. This is particularly important for those of you who need a lot of food to feel full.
Let me introduce you to the idea of energy density. Basically, that’s how many calories a food contains per unit of volume. As it turns out, for many of us, how much food we eat is an important aspect of feeling full. Eating foods with a low energy density allows us to eat satisfying portions of food and still take in fewer calories. Barbara Rolls, PhD, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, made an important observation a few years ago an observation that may seem obvious but had never been demonstrated before: most of us eat about the same volume of food each day. What makes up that volume changes from day to day, but the amount stays pretty stable. What this means is that if you eat the same volume but consume fewer calories, you will feel full but will lose weight.
So, what kinds of foods have lower energy density? Generally, these are foods with a high water content, so fruits and vegetables are front and centre. Let me give you an example of how this works: you eat a bowl of pasta for dinner. A 60g (20z) serving of pasta that’s just over 200 calories and a light sprinkling of olive oil and Parmesan cheese that’s another 200 calories and there you have a small serving of pasta. Your 400-calorie meal is tiny, and unlikely to seem the ‘right’ size to you. But what if you decided instead to add some fresh tomatoes to the pasta you could sauté the tomato in the olive oil you were going to add to your pasta anyway, then maybe you’d add some onions, courgettes and mushrooms.
You could double the amount of food you eat, triple it even, and add fewer than 50 calories. But, chances are, you’d feel a lot fuller after the second dish than the first dish. (Of course, that’s a fake argument because you’d probably eat a larger serving of that first one anyway!) Adding vegetables contributes to your sense of satiety without contributing to calories. Now, that’s a bargain.
Fruits and veggies are high in fibre, and fibre promotes weight loss. As you know, fruits and vegetables have lots of fibre. At its most basic level, fibre is the stuff in fruits and vegetables that isn’t starch and that’s hard to digest. There are two kinds of fibre, and they are both good for you, albeit in different ways. Soluble fibre turns to jelly in your stomach. As such, it promotes a sense of fullness, and it slows the absorption of sugar and other nutrients so that your glucose level has less of a tendency to get out of hand. Soluble fibre is found in foods like oats. Diets high in soluble fibre have been found to decrease the risk of heart disease.
Insoluble fibre cannot be absorbed by the gut. It passes through your digestive system virtually untouched. But it promotes stool bulk and causes water to be absorbed by the lower intestines, moving food through and preventing constipation. This is important to everyone, but especially those on a carbohydrate-counting diet, since constipation is a frequent side effect. High-fibre diets reduce the risk of some cancers and help prevent diverticular disease.
Finally, fruits, vegetables and other high-fibre foods may help you lose weight by increasing your body’s production of a hormone called protein YY. When obese and thin people are given injections of this protein (as explained in a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine), they ate much less food over the next 24 hours. Researchers believe that a high-fibre diet, which increases your protein YY level, will also make you feel less hungry.
Fruits and vegetables promote weight loss. Because fruits and vegetables have a lower energy density than most other foods, eating these foods rather than something else will promote weight loss. And most fruits and vegetables are very low glycaemic-load foods, so they not only provide bulk with fewer calories, but they are easy on your insulin level as well, which may help you lose weight too.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Potatoes have a high glycaemic load (GL). One serving of a baked potato has a GL of 26. Much higher that the GL of peas (3), carrots (2) or cherries (3). That puts it in the same category as some cakes and biscuits. Does this mean you can’t have potatoes? No, but it means that you should limit your potato intake, and when you do eat them, add a low-fat protein to slow down the glycaemic load. Low-fat cottage cheese does a nice job. Other low-fat cheeses work as well. Or add some salsa with or without a touch of olive oil. And, of course, lower your intake of chips. Most fast-food varieties are fried in oils high in trans fats, so they are a double nutritional debit.
Beta-carotene and other antioxidants prevent disease. You know these are good for you, but do you know why? The way your body is damaged and ages is through oxidation, a perfectly natural process. (On the other hand, so is dying. So if we can fight it, we should.) Dietary antioxidants in the form of fruits and vegetables look like one way to do just that. In one study, people who ate at least five servings of these foods a day lived longer (and were thinner) than those who ate less. But you can’t take the healthy ingredients and put them in a pill and get the same benefit. Studies have shown that antioxidant supplements will not provide the same protection as their fruit and vegetable sources.
Vitamins and minerals are essential for health. Carbohydrates, proteins and fats are the basic categories of foods that we eat; they are called macronutrients, because they are the energy and building blocks of our bodies. In many foods there are other important components that we call micronutrients. We need only tiny amounts of these components, but they are important for many of the biological processes that go on in our bodies. We need all of these micronutrients, and when we don’t get them, we get sick. Many of these come from the fruits and veggies you eat.
Some of the ways fruits and vegetables are treated reduces their nutritional value. Canned foods have lower nutritional value than frozen foods. Frozen foods have lower value than fresh foods. Some ways of cooking are better than others. For example, boiling foods can leach some of the nutrients into the water, which is discarded. Steaming or sautéing avoids this problem. On the other hand, eating these foods any way you can get them is better than not having them, so don’t let availability or cooking preference interfere with your eating them.
A special word about nuts: Nuts are not usually considered in a article about fruits and vegetables, but I would argue that they ought to be. Nuts are a nutrient-dense food that I think should be made part of a healthy diet. Yes, they are high in calories, they are also high in fibre, high in high-quality protein and high in polyunsaturated fats.
Studies have shown that a diet high in nuts can improve lipids and reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes. And although nuts have lots of calories and usually lots of salt, they are also high in their ability to sate appetite. (So, eat nuts but avoid bingeing on them.)
How Much Is Enough?
The usual recommendation is to eat five servings of fruits or vegetables per day. I would go further than that. If you like these foods, this group is the one type of food that I would say ‘more is better’. These low-glycaemic-index fruits and vegetables can and should be eaten freely. So five servings per day is a good goal, but if you want more, eat more, unless you’re on the 3D-gram Counting Carbohydrates Diet. Those who are limiting their carbs to 30 grams or less a day will get only a few servings of vegetables and fruits per day. But, remember, that stage of the diet is only for a couple of months. Any longer than that and it becomes much less effective. So the ban on fruit and veggie gorging is brief.
Is There Any Bad News about Fruits and Vegetables?
No. Not from my perspective. Some people are concerned about increasing their exposure to the pesticides used in growing these foods. Within the past 10 years, there has been a great deal of literature published on the subject, particularly in Europe, and the UK Comittee on the Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (COT) has concluded that the probability of any health hazard is likely to be small.
These studies have also shown either no or small residues on foods. I think the strongest argument for the healthiness of fruits and vegetables lies in the studies showing that people who eat more fruits and veggies are healthier (not to mention thinner) than those who eat fewer. So, if you like these foods, eat up!
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