Читать книгу PCOS Diet Book: How you can use the nutritional approach to deal with polycystic ovary syndrome - Theresa Cheung - Страница 32

Fruits are limited more than vegetables on the PCOS diet because many women have the tendency to eat them alone – particularly those like sugar-rich bananas and raisins which can give you an insulin rise if you don’t eat them with proteins like a handful of nuts. All-fruit meals can upset your blood-sugar levels, creating that familiar peak followed by a slump in mood.

It may seem hard to fit in so many portions of fruit and vegetables, but vegetable soups and frozen and tinned fruits and vegetables all count. A very good way of boosting your intake is to invest in a juicer and make your own freshly-pressed juices such as apple and carrot, banana and apple, apple and celery, mango and pear or whatever mixture takes your fancy. For the best benefit, drink the juice as soon as you have made it, as contact with the air destroys vital vitamins and minerals. The downside of juicers is that they extract the pulp so you don’t get the benefit of the fibre slowing down the release of sugar into your bloodstream. To get fibre, try using a blender to make smoothie-type drinks using berries and soft fruits such as pears, and soya milk or organic low-fat yogurt. You can also add in a teaspoon of Omega-3-rich oils such as hempseed or linseed (see page 40).

Eat whole fruits and whole vegetables wherever possible. These foods contain more fibre and generally have less of an effect on your blood-sugar than do refined, processed and juiced foods. A whole apple is better than apple juice, for instance, but fresh-pressed apple juice is better than juice from concentrate – and certainly better than nothing at all!

The way you prepare your fruits and vegetables will maximize their goodness. Heating, re-heating and storage often destroy nutrients, so try to eat as many as possible raw and fresh. Steaming or stir-frying are the best cooking methods to seal in the vital nutrients. If you do boil your vegetables, keep the water for a stock or a soup, as this is where all the nutrients will have gone.

Once a fruit or vegetable is picked or cut, it starts to lose nutrients. There is no telling how long fresh vegetables have lingered in the shop or warehouse (some are put in cold storage for as long as six months; others are picked long before they ripen to their most nutrient-rich state so that they can be flown across the world to another country before they go bad). Frozen vegetables are frozen immediately they are picked, so can sometimes be even better than fresh ones.

Ideally you should avoid peeling as much as possible, because vitamins often lie just beneath the skin of fruit and vegetables, but washing thoroughly or peeling is recommended for non-organic produce because of the potentially toxic effects of pesticides and fertilizers.