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Show Fitness Tips By DALE NELSON Utah State Univ. Pound for pound, the best way to spend your calories is on fruit. In a day when calories kill us, that's a tip worth putting put-ting into practice. THE NEXT time you finish dinner and feel like indulging in a high-calorie dessert, have a piece of fruit instead. A small piece of chocolate cake or a chunk of apple pie, which in a pinch you could put away in about a minute, provides about 300 calories. How long would it take you to eat four medium-sized apples? ap-ples? Or eight small peaches? Or a quart and a half of strawberries? straw-berries? Each carries about the same number of calories, nutrients. (About all you get with the cake and pie is a guilty conscience and sticky teeth fit for healthy cavity-oriented bacteria.) In addition, you get a sizeable amount of pectin (a fiber) in apples and citrus fruits. Bananas, cheeries, grapes, tomatoes, peaches and raspberries rasp-berries are also good sources. Pectin has proven effective in lowering cholesterol by as much as 20 percent in humans. That, too, is a healthy tip worthy of building into your nutritional lifestyle. THE anthropoligists tell us we evolved as fruit eaters. In certain climates and at certain times of the year, fruit probably prob-ably made up as much as 50 percent of our prehistoric diet, they say. Fruit lost its punch when refined re-fined sugar came along and spoiled our taste buds rotten. Believe it or not, there are people peo-ple living on tropical islands who eat a lot of fruit and who would not like candy if it were given to them. It's too sweet! I eat- fresh fruit on my unsweetened un-sweetened granola and like it better than sugar. YOU'VE GOT a sweet tooth, you say. Well, fruit will satisfy that sweet tooth naturally. natu-rally. It gives us sugar but in a way and at a pace that our bodies have been designed to handle. Refined sugar comes at us in a form too concentrated, the result of which can be feelings of weakness and actual hunger as the pancreas panics and produces pro-duces more sugar-taming insulin in-sulin than is good for us. FRUIT HAS to be chewed and digested, and because it supplies its own natural sugar buffers in the form of fiber, provides the kind of gradual and usable energy boost that the 20th century candy bar and cake cannot. You'll get a lot more mileage from fruit and that's where we came in trying to save calories and get sufficient nutrients. While we are making a special spe-cial case for fruit in your nutritional nutri-tional lifestyle, let's not lose sight of many fresh vegetables that will also serve you well. Lettuce, carrots, celery, cauliflower and cucumbers are a few that come to mind. |