The Doctor's Diet: Dr. Travis Stork's STAT Program to Help You Lose Weight & Restore Your Health (33 page)
Authors: Travis Stork
pears
persimmons
plums
pomegranates (seeds)
raspberries
strawberries
tangerines
watermelon
Q: I HAVE TYPE 2 DIABETES. CAN I EAT FRUIT?
A:
You’ll want to check with your own doctor on this, but in general, diabetes health experts say it’s good to include fruit in a healthy diabetes diet as long as it fits in to your daily carbohydrate limits. For example, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) encourages fruit consumption as part of its
carbohydrate-counting method for managing blood glucose. It can be eaten in exchange for such other sources of carbohydrates in your meal plan as starches, grains, or dairy. Because fruits vary in their carbohydrate content, the ADA program recommends limiting portion sizes to 15 grams of carbohydrates—the equivalent of about 1 small piece of fresh fruit (4 ounces), ½ cup of frozen or canned fruit (without syrup or juice), ¾ to 1 cup of fresh berries or melon, or 2 tablespoons of dried fruit.
Q: IS DRIED FRUIT INCLUDED IN THE DOCTOR’S DIET?
A:
Raisins, dates, and other dried fruits are not recommended in the STAT and RESTORE Plans, but they are part of the MAINTAIN Plan. Dried fruits contain a fair amount of concentrated sugar. They’re still fruit, so they’re a better choice than cookies, donuts, and other processed foods with added sugar. Although they’re small, they’re high in calories, so it’s easy to eat too many.
Berries are an important part of The Doctor’s Diet. Blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries are fantastic sources of a variety of antioxidants, which protect cells from damage and help fight disease. In fact, they have higher antioxidant levels than any other fresh fruits. (Apples, cherries, and plums also rank high on lists of foods with antioxidants.)
Antioxidants in berries are believed to help prevent some kinds of cancers, as well as protect the health of the heart, brain, eyes, and immune system. Berries are a great source of other nutrients as well—including fiber and vitamin C.
Berries stand out for another reason: they have less impact on blood sugar than most other fruits. If you have diabetes or your doctor has told you to keep an eye on your blood sugar, berries are a great choice because they have a low carbohydrate count and are low on the glycemic index (again, meaning they are low in sugar).
Go ahead and mix berries into whole-grain cereal and stir them into yogurt, but think out of the box as well—add them to salads, combine them with whole grains such as quinoa for a tasty side dish, or mash them up with a splash of olive oil, vinegar, and black pepper as a sweet-savory sauce for meat and fish.
Fresh berries in season taste best, but it’s also fine to use frozen or canned berries (as long as they have no added sugar). I always keep a few bags of berries on hand in my freezer to toss into smoothies. You can also enjoy munching on frozen raspberries right out of the bag—they taste like raspberry sorbet!
Q: SHOULD I AVOID FRUIT JUICE?
A:
Generally it’s better to consume whole fruit than fruit juice. Even if fruit juice is made from 100 percent fruit, with no added sugar, drinking it still dumps a lot of sugar into your system all at once. Take orange juice, for example. Having an 8-ounce glass of orange juice pours 22 grams of sugar into your body. Without fiber to slow down absorption, that sugar gets into your bloodstream pretty quickly. If you eat an orange, however, you get about half the amount of natural sugar—plus, an orange contains a few grams of fiber, which slow down absorption of the orange’s sugar into your blood. So my advice is to go light on fruit juice and to choose whole fruit instead. And if you do drink fruit juice, choose 100 percent juice rather than those fruit punch-type drinks, many of which have as much sugar as soda.
GO FOR WHOLE
Whole fruit is more filling than processed food, according to a 2009 study published in the journal
Appetite
. In the study, subjects consumed an apple, applesauce, or apple juice 15 minutes before eating a buffet lunch. Those who munched on apples consumed fewer calories at lunch and reported feeling fuller and more satiated than those who ate applesauce or drank apple juice.
So there you go. Not only do you have permission to start eating apples and berries and cherries and melon and peaches and all kinds of other fruit again. You have something even better than that: a prescription to start including these delicious foods in your diet—not just because they taste great and add valuable nutrients, but because they help with weight loss and can slash your risk of disease. What’s not to love about that?
GO NUTS OVER NUTS
Nuts are one of my favorite foods—not just because they taste so good, but because they’re so amazingly fantastic for health and weight loss. Almonds, cashews, peanuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, Brazil nuts, pine nuts—I love them all.
I never go anywhere without a couple servings of these super-portable “fast foods”—and by fast foods, I mean that I can eat them in a hurry when I’m hungry between meals and tempted to snack on chips or other junk food.
Nuts find their way into many of my meals as well. For breakfast I’ll drop chopped walnuts and blueberries into my yogurt, mix slivered almonds into my oatmeal, or spread pure almond butter on whole-grain toast, an apple, or a banana. At lunch I’ll sprinkle pecans or pine nuts on salads, and at dinner I enjoy peanuts mixed into stir-fries or blended with Thai spices into a sauce for poultry or fish.
I do keep an eye on my serving sizes, of course. Although nuts are terrifically healthy, they are also fairly high in calories. What’s nice is that they are so satisfying that it really doesn’t take many of them to take the edge off food cravings. In the afternoon, a handful goes a long way towards satisfying my hunger. And they fill me up for a while, so unlike other snacks, they leave me satiated enough that I can easily make it to dinner without thinking about food again.
| THE PEANUT IS ACTUALLY A LEGUME RATHER THAN A TRUE NUT. BUT SINCE MOST OF US THINK OF PEANUTS AS BEING PART OF THE NUT FAMILY, THAT’S HOW WE’LL CATEGORIZE THEM IN THE DOCTOR’S DIET. |
