Know your food to reduce your flab
Fight Obesity
We all fight hard during the week to cope up with hectic schedules and tight deadlines, it is the weekend which brings us a breather. We relax and let ourselves go, which means getting up late in the morning and having a king size breakfast or a rather large brunch.
This is true for most of us. No matter whether we keep this opulence a private affair or rope in relatives and friends to make Sunday brunches a grand affair, one thing is sure -- during weekend brunches, we end up having more fun and eating more food
than usual.
Brunch always has to be just more than healthy to bring a zing to the weekend indulgence, but these brunches can also contribute to our bellies and flab.
Swapna Chaturvedi, dietician at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, says, “This is simply because when it comes to lavish brunches, we often fall for calorie-laden delicacies, not because there is a lack of options but mostly because we are unaware of them. As a matter of fact, eating healthy is just about being a little smart. In fact, foods with low glycemic index (GI), like brown rice, can be substituted for not just polished rice but a lot of other refined foods like maida and white sugar as well.”
High GI foods can be swapped with low GI foods, for instance, by switching to brown rice from polished white rice or maida, one can stay away from excess calories. Some Low GI foods are, all bran, oat bran, rolled oats, special K, natural muesli, porridge, soya, linseed, sourdough wheat and rye.
GI is simply a figure representing the relative ability of a carbohydrate food to increase the level of glucose in the blood - about which we should ideally be aware of.
According to experts, foods containing low GI are digested slowly and fill the stomach slowly while providing satiety from hunger for longer period of time, leading to a check on hunger pangs. Apart from this, low GI foods reduce both postprandial blood glucose and insulin responses, thereby preventing impaired blood sugar levels, and dyslipidemias.
This implies that instead of eating only high GI foods, if one balances the meals with a combination of high and low GI foods, weight gain and unnecessary calorie consumption can be controlled to a large extent.
Brown rice becomes a perfect and healthy item for your elaborate brunch as compared to refined cereals as a research article published in the American-Eurasian Journal of Agronomy (2009) suggests. Milling and polishing of brown rice destroys 67 per cent of Vitamin B3, 80 per cent of Vitamin B1, 90 per cent of Vitamin B6, half of the manganese and phosphorous, 60 per cent of iron and all of the dietary fibre and essential fatty acids it contains.
As far as a healthier variety of brown rice is concerned, although brown rice of any variety is equally beneficial for health, the basic difference lies in the glycemic index and size of grain.
Dietitian Mukta Vasishta, HOD, Department of Nutrition and Dietetics, Sir Gangaram Hospital says, “With a GI of only 8.6, non-basmati brown rice has not just been shown to reduce the risk of chronic diseases when incorporated into diets but also makes an excellent option for people watching their weight and waist circumference and yet wish to enjoy their Sunday brunches with friends and relatives.”
So, the bottomline is, ‘switch to healthy foods and cereals’ and enjoy a guilt-free gastronomic indulgence with family and friends.
