The Apple: A Perfect Fruit for Weight Loss?

It’s no secret that apples offer a nutrient goldmine. Here are three ways that the nutrients in apples keep those doctors away and help keep your body healthy and ready for weight loss.

Soluble Fiber

Unlike insoluble fiber (think: kale), soluble fiber can absorb and trap liquids (think of how oatmeal absorbs water). In your body, soluble fiber absorbs and traps cholesterol, and actually helps to remove it from your body. Because of their soluble fiber, apples have been shown to decrease total cholesterol (neat, huh?!).

Antioxidants

Nearly every fruit and vegetable has a unique array of antioxidants that help the body to protect itself from “oxidation,” or normal wear and tear resulting from normal life. Think of iron rusting—that’s oxidation. By eating foods with antioxidants, you can prevent this “rust” from building up. One of the antioxidants found in apples lessens the oxidation of fat cell membranes. If a lot of fat cell membranes get into the blood flow, someone gets increased risk for clogged arteries, which we all know lead to a lot of different heart problems. So protect your heart by eating apples!

Blood Sugar Regulation

A handful of nutrients in apples work together to help keep blood sugar stable. First, some nutrients increase the amount of time it takes for the apple to be digested into the simple sugars (glucose) that your body uses for energy. Then, other nutrients slow down the process of pushing that glucose into your blood stream.

This is good—when the release of glucose is slower, your blood sugar does not “spike,” your body does not have to work as hard to manage a large dose of sugar, and you are satiated for a longer period of time.

Meanwhile, other nutrients in apples ask the body to produce more insulin, which helps to take the simple sugars out of our blood and turn them into energy. So apples include nutrients that slow digestion, slow glucose release, and increase the available insulin to process the glucose. We couldn’t design this process better if we tried!

But Which Type of Apple is the Best?

Funny you should ask! A few years ago, I did a bit of an experiment on my personal blog with the apples available in my local grocery store. Curious to see which apple I selected to reign above them all? Check out this post.

New Ways to Enjoy Them

Apples are not a hard food to add to your diet: just grab one and go! But here are some recipes that sneak in apple and it’s nutritional (and taste!) benefits in places you wouldn’t normally expect. In fact, with these 3 recipes you can sneak apple into breakfast, lunch, and dinner quite easily!

Apple Pumpkin Oatmeal: Breakfast (368 calories)

What better way to embrace chilly fall mornings than with a yummy and healthy fall breakfast?

Roasted Butternut Squash and Apple Soup via @thelemonbowl: Lunch (238 calories for 2 cups)

Apples give a bright freshness to butternut squash soup – the apple/squash pairing is one of our fall favorites!

Turkey Apple Burgers: Dinner (267 calories per burger)

Turkey burgers can be rather dry, and putting apple in them is a easy and healthy way to moisten them up. Don’t be shy to try other variations of this burger – I made one with apple, scallion, garam masala, salt, and pepper in it for dinner last night, and it was excellent!

Do you have any other clever ways to add apples into your meals? Let us know! Tweet us @loseit or leave a comment on our Facebook page!

- Posted from the road

Carbs – Their Role in Health & Weight Loss

What are carbs exactly?

Carbohydrates consist of starches, sugars, and fibers, and are found in grainy and starchy foods, like bread, pasta, potatoes, and fruit. Carbohydrates are either digestible (sugars, starches), or indigestible (fiber). Sugars and starches provide your body with energy in the form of calories and the fiber has four main roles; it:

Keeps your digestive system healthy: a diet rich in insoluble-fiber can prevent constipation, keep the important bacteria in your gut happy, and reduce risk for colon cancer.

Improve Blood Sugar Control: fiber slows down the rate at which glucose (sugar) from food enters your blood stream. This means that your blood sugar doesn’t spike, your body doesn’t have to work as hard to manage a large dose of sugar, and you’re satiated for longer.

Keep you full for longer — foods high in fiber fill us up without too many calories!
Blueberries and oatmeal in white bowl

How are carbs digested?

Step 1: The Mouth

Unlike protein and fat, carbohydrate digestion actually begins right in the mouth! Your saliva includes a starch-digesting enzyme called “Amylase.” Have you ever noticed that when you chew starchy foods for a long time, they start to taste even sweeter? That’s because this amylase in your saliva is breaking the starches in the food down into simple sugars! From your mouth, the food & amylase go down your esophagus and on to the next step of digestion.

Step 2: The Stomach

Not too much happens to carbohydrates in the stomach. The amylase enzyme from your saliva is deactivated by the stomach acid, and the carbohydrates just sort of hang out there – no digestion occurs here.

Step 3: The Small Intestine

Now this is where things really get going! Remember the salivary amylase that started to break down starches and sugars in your mouth? Here in the stomach, pancreatic amylase (an enzyme send to your small intestine from your pancreas) picks up the starch-breaking-down job, along with the help of a few other enzymes. After all the sugars and starches are broken down into sugar molecules (remember, fiber isn’t digestible!), they absorbed through the walls of the small intestine, and make their way over to your blood stream, where they are first transported to the liver, where the different sugar molecules are all converted to glucose, and then released into the blood stream.



Step 4a: Blood Stream

Then, increased blood sugar levels trigger our pancreas to release insulin, which directs the blood sugar around your body, encouraging your cells to take in the glucose they need. This is how insulin lowers your blood sugar. If there is more glucose in your blood stream than your cells need, insulin will encourage your liver and muscles to store glucose as glycogen until your blood sugar is low again. If there’s still more glucose than your body can store, insulin will build fat molecules from the extra glucose and store it. Think of insulin as a traffic cop, directing glucose molecules around your body and helping them find a place to go.

While we’re on the topic, after insulin successfully lowers your blood glucose and you haven’t eaten in a while, your pancreas will produce glucagon, a hormone that tells your liver and muscles to give up that glucose it’s storing, thereby raising your blood sugar again!

Step 4b: The Large intestine

All right—back to the digestion. At this point all that’s really left of the food you ate is fiber, and things trapped within that fiber. Luckily, the bacteria that live in your large intestine really like fiber. They digest some of the soluble fiber here (which keeps them healthy and helps to reduce risk for colon cancer), and metabolize it into acids and gases (yes, this is why you fart!).

Step 5: The Rectum

Well we’ve made it to the end of the line now. That remaining fiber and other waste products escape from the digestive tract, and are excreted.

How many carbs should I be eating every day?

The USDA recommends that 45% to 65% of calories you eat come from carbohydrates, largely because the sugars and starches in carbohydrates provide fairly quick energy for you body in the form of calories. Different amounts of carbohydrates may be better for different people – this isn’t really a one-size-fits-all thing!

Something that IS a one size fits all thing, though, is the fiber recommendations. Women should aim for at least 25 grams of fiber a day, and men for 38 grams a day.

As you probably know, the recommendation for sugar is to keep intake low, but there isn’t a consistent recommendation. Some sources recommend that less than 6% of your daily calories come from sugar, and other recommend that less than 25% of calories come from sugar—two vastly different numbers!

The recommendations for carbs in general aren’t super specific, but if you focus on fiber you’ll be on track for very healthy carbohydrate digestion!

This week’s post is from Roshini Raj, MD, a board certified gastroenterologist and internist, and one of Lose It!’s advisory board members!

More about Dr. Raj:

Dr. Roshini Raj is a board certified gastroenterologist and internist. She is also a nationally known media personality; she is a Today Show contributor, the Good Day NY Medical Correspondent (Fox5) and the Medical Editor of Health magazine. She has also been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,Women’s Health and Fitness. Dr. Raj is the author of What the Yuck?! The Freaky & Fabulous Truth About Your Body. She also recently co-founded TULA (tulaforlife.com), a new probiotic skin care line.

- Posted from the road