Why eating more fruit and veg doesn’t always help you lose weight

Increasing your intake of plant-based food shouldn’t lead to weight gain – unless you only eat starchy foods or forget to cut down on your calories

Will eating more fruit and vegetables make me thin?

Want to get thin? Eat more fruit and vegetables – they’re a low-calorie way of filling up, right? The health site WebMD has “eat more fruit and vegetables” as one of its “22 best diet tips ever” and the next US Dietary Guidelines are likely to push a “healthy Mediterranean-style diet”, big on plant-based food, to avoid more people becoming super-sized. But dietary advice being notoriously fickle, a research paper in this month’s PLOS Medicine says that eating more fruit and vegetables doesn’t necessarily help weight loss: it depends which ones you eat. Eating starchy vegetables such as corn and potatoes (boiled, mashed or baked – the amount of butter added unknown) was linked to weight gain. Eating more high-fibre, lower-glycemic vegetables such as broccoli and brussels sprouts was associated with weight loss. Lower-glycemic foods do not raise blood sugar levels as much as higher ones. So should you stick to non-starchy vegetables and is most fruit still a slimming aid?

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from Health & wellbeing | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1Vyx0JC
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