Got this article from a friend via e-mail and thought of sharing ‘em out…
By Arthur Agatston, M.D.
The equation behind most obesity is simple: The faster the sugars and starches you eat are processed and absorbed into your bloodstream, the fatter you get.
Therefore, anything that speeds the process by which your body digests carbohydrates is bad for your diet, and anything that slows it down is good. Digestion is simply the action of your stomach breaking down food into its components. Anything that keeps food intact longer is beneficial for people trying to lose weight.
Keeping that in mind, it’s important to recognize that the process of digestion begins even before you swallow your food. In fact, it starts the moment you start preparing it.
Here’s an example: Raw broccoli is crunchy, hard, cold, and covered with a layer of nutritious fiber. If you eat it that way, your stomach has really got to work in order to get at the carbs. That’s a good thing. Of course, outside of a cocktail party’s crudités table, we almost never eat broccoli raw. First we wash it, then we throw away the toughest part of the stalk, then we cut it up, and then we boil it or steam it until it’s soft and warm.
That’s also a fair approximation of what your stomach does to food—through the combination of churning muscles and the potent gastric juices and acids it produces, your stomach physically tears food to shreds and partly liquefies it. Whether it’s in a pot on the stove or in your stomach, the same essential process happens to the broccoli and everything else you eat.
Why Processed Food Is Fattening
In the case of processed foods, digestion begins even earlier—in fact, it starts long before the food hits the supermarket shelf. Consider that loaf of sliced white bread. First the wheat is stripped of bran and fiber, and then it’s pulverized into the finest white flour. The baking process puffs it up into light, airy slices of bread. No wonder your stomach makes such quick work of it. A slice of white bread hits your bloodstream with the same jolt you’d get by eating a tablespoon of table sugar right from the bowl! Marie Antoinette would have a hard time telling it from cake, and the truth is that there’s not much difference.
Genuine, old-fashioned bread—the coarse, chewy kind with a thick crust and visible pieces of grain, the type you can only buy from a bakery or a health-food store—puts your stomach to work. It, too, is made of wheat, but the grains haven’t been processed to death. You may even see pieces of bran in the bread. It contains starches, which are just chains of sugars, but they are bound up with the fiber, so digestion takes longer. As a result, the sugars are released gradually into the bloodstream. If there’s no sudden surge in blood sugar, your pancreas won’t produce as much insulin, and you won’t get the exaggerated craving for more carbs.
This is crucial to understanding how your body operates: The more food is preprocessed, the more fattening it will be.
The good news, of course, is that you can partly control the glycemic index of your food just by choosing how you’ll prepare it.
The Difference Food Preparation Can Make
Take a potato, for instance. An incredibly versatile vegetable. You can do a hundred things with it, from soup to vodka—what you do with it determines how fattening it is.
Baked: The worst way, from the glycemic-index perspective? Baked. The process of baking it renders the starches most easily accessible to your digestive system.
Served with sour cream: Slightly better? Believe it or not, that baked potato will be less fattening topped with a dollop of low-fat cheese or sour cream. The calorie count will be slightly higher, but the fat contained in the cheese or sour cream will slow down the digestive process, thereby lessening the amount of insulin that potato prompts your body to make.
Still, don’t think that when you’re at the mall and stop for a quick baked potato at one of those franchise places that you’re having a healthy snack. A baked potato in the midafternoon practically guarantees that you’ll be starving for carbs by dinner. You’d be better off having a small ice cream or even a dark chocolate bar instead of a baked potato.
Mashed or boiled: Better than baked? Mashed or boiled, due to the difference in the cooking process, but also because you’d probably eat them with a little butter or sour cream (and the fat slows the digestive process).
French fries: Even french fries are better than baked, believe it or not, because of the fat in which they’re cooked. Of course, the same is true of potato chips, but don’t be misled: None of these are good choices for someone on the South Beach Diet™.
Potato type: The type of potato you eat is also a big factor in all this. Red-skinned potatoes are highest in carbs. White-skinned are better. New potatoes, better yet—in every vegetable or fruit, the younger when picked, the lower the carb count. If you must indulge, do so sparingly. And try sweet potatoes instead of white.
Why Whole Foods Are Better
How bad is white bread? Worse than ice cream. If you’re about to sit down to dinner and need to decide whether to have white bread with it or ice cream after, go for the ice cream—it’s less fattening.
But, of course, not all bread is white bread. A good rule of thumb is that the coarser and heavier bread is, the better it is for you.
These principles apply across the board: Whole and intact is better than chopped or sliced, which is better than diced, which is better than mashed or pureed—all of which is better than juiced.
An apple, for instance, has got a fair amount of pectin, a soluble fiber, in its skin. If you eat an apple, your stomach has got to contend with the fiber before it can get to the fructose. Similarly, an orange has its fiber in the pulp and in the white pithy stuff that clings to the flesh.
But take that apple and peel it, and then juice it, and you’ve got something quite a bit different. The micronutrients and the fiber are in the skin. With the skin intact, it may take you five minutes to eat that apple. But it requires just a few seconds to drink the equivalent in juice.
And keep in mind that the glycemic-index number is in part determined by the speed with which you eat and digest your food or drink. This is why diabetics having a hypoglycemic reaction quickly drink some orange juice rather than eat the fruit. And while fructose is preferable to sucrose, a big glass of juice acts a lot like a soda—a pure sugar rush. This is especially true of processed juice made without fiber or pulp, which for many people is the only kind they buy.
The fiber delays your stomach’s effort to get at the sugars and starches in carbohydrates. The fiber in vegetables like broccoli is cellulose, which is, in essence, wood. The nutrients are bound up in that fiber, too, so the stomach has to work harder to get at the nutrition.
More Sugar Stoppers
Fiber is not the only thing that gets in the way of sugars. Fats and proteins also slow the speed with which your stomach does its job on carbs. Eating a little protein, or some fat—good fat, naturally—along with your carbs, is beneficial.
A little olive oil on your bread, or some low-fat cheese, is actually better for you than the bread alone. Pasta with tomato sauce and a chunk of Italian bread is an extremely high-carb meal. Such a meal eaten with some meat or cheese is better. Sitting down to a nice baked potato for lunch isn’t such a hot idea. Having that potato with a piece of steak and some broccoli renders it better for your diet than a potato on its own. You’ll actually make less insulin, and you’ll reduce the cravings for more food in the hours ahead.
The Skinny on Drinks
When we talk about diet, we talk so exclusively about the things we eat that it’s easy to forget how much has to do with the things we drink. But your body doesn’t make that distinction—by the time your meal reaches your small intestine, it’s all liquid.
In fact, what you drink is critical because it requires little digestion and, therefore, goes more directly into your bloodstream. If there’s sugar in that beverage, it will speed into your system, prompting the burst of insulin that leads to cravings later on.
Water: At one end of the drink spectrum, to no one’s surprise, is water. By now we’ve all heard the health gospel that we need at least two or three quarts of it a day. There’s some question about whether we really require quite so much, but a good rule is to reach for water whenever you’re thirsty. It’s especially good for dieters, because it creates the sensation of a full belly.
Beer: At the other end of the spectrum is beer. As discussed, it has a high glycemic index thanks to its main component, maltose, which is even worse than table sugar.
Wine and whiskey: Wine, and even whiskey, are safer bets because they’re made from different grains, vegetables, or fruit. Not that whiskey is part of any serious weight-loss effort, of course. White wine is better. Best of all is red wine, because it brings with it some significant, proven cardiac benefits thanks to the resveratrol contained in the grape skins.
Soda: It’s no surprise that sodas are a major source of sugar, so I won’t belabor it. Sweetened iced teas aren’t much better.
Coffee and tea: Coffee, of course, contains no sugar on its own. People have grown accustomed to hearing doctors advise against excesses, but I don’t think they’re all that bad in moderation. Some diets steer people toward decaf for the simple reason that caffeine stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin, which is the last thing an overweight person needs. Still, the effect isn’t all that great, and if a cup or two of coffee a day makes you happy, I think you should feel free. Tea may actually play a role in the prevention of heart attack and prostate cancer.
Fruit juice: Again, fruit juices are a big source of trouble, in part because we’ve come to associate them with healthy habits. They do carry nutrients, especially freshly made juices. But they also bring with them high levels of fructose, which can be the undoing of any effort to lose weight.
If you were to eat an orange, you’d get the same fructose as in the juice. But you’d also be getting a lot of fiber in the flesh and pulp and membranes. Your stomach would have to work to separate the sugar from everything else in the course of digestion. In addition, you might eat one orange at a sitting, maybe two if you were hungry or if they were on the small side. But peeling an orange is work, and eating one takes time.
Not surprisingly, store-bought juice is the worst offender. Fresh-squeezed, because of the fibrous pulp and the superior nutrients, is better.
This holds for nearly all fruit juices. Pineapple juice? Just loaded with sugar. Grape? The same. All of a sudden, it seems that America’s parents fell in love with apple juice and began giving it to their kids with every meal. From a sugar consumption point of view, this was a bad idea. The skin of an apple is actually quite healthy-the pectin is a good fiber that accompanies the fructose into your system. Eating an apple a day is still a prescription for well-being—but drinking its juice is not.
Vegetable juice: When it comes to vegetable juices you’ve got a bit more latitude. But the health food store mainstay-fresh carrot juice—isn’t on the approved list. As we’ve noted elsewhere, carrots have a high glycemic index.
Beet juice is said to be good for many reasons, but it is loaded with sugars, too. I’ve heard that tossing a banana into the blender along with a little milk and some berries, accompanied by ice, makes a good summer smoothie. But bananas are among the worst fruits in terms of fructose content. If you knew nothing about nutrition and were asked to guess which fruits and vegetables contain the most sugar, you’d probably fare pretty well. The sweeter the taste, the more sugar is present. Watermelon is bad. Tomatoes are better. Broccoli juice would be best, if anybody actually wanted to indulge in a glass every day with breakfast. Be glad that the South Beach Diet™ doesn’t require a big glass of broccoli juice every day.
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