Specific Fruits And Veggies More Helpful For Weight Loss

After adjusting for factors such as smoking that could affect the result, she observed that increasing consumption of fruits and non-starchy vegetables led to a significant weight change over several four-year intervals.

Researchers from Harvard and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston looked at the specific produce people ate over 24 years as well as how much weight that person gained or loss.

“Unfortunately, most Americans have inadequate fruit and vegetable intake”. Furthermore, eating more fruit caused more weight loss than eating more veggies.

Fiber may be important, too: Keane noted that high-fiber vegetables were also tied to better weight control when the Harvard team factored out potato intake.

Writing in the journal PLOS Medicine, researcher Monica Bertoia, said: “Although the magnitude of weight change associated with each increased daily serving was modest, combining an increase of one to two servings of vegetables and one to two servings of fruits daily would be associated with substantial weight change”.

The researchers thus suggested that “nutritional guidelines ought to emphasize individual or subgroups of specific fruits and vegetables that maximize the potential for weight maintenance and disease prevention”.

Blueberries: In this research they found who ate an extra handful of blueberries each day lost more than half a kilogram. But satisfying our vegetable requirements with starchy vegetables, alas, will not keep the pounds from adding up.

The pattern was changed when participants revealed an up tick in their intake of cooked, boiled and crushed maize, potatoes and beans.

Fruit was twice as good as veg, with every extra portion a day leading to around half a pound of flab being shed over four years.

It’s possible that the reason for the weight loss is that people eat fruits and vegetables instead of eating other, less healthy foods. But some of their benefits, the researchers say, may be far simpler: When we increase our consumption of these foods, they usually crowd out foods that are denser in fat and calories, such as meats and gooey desserts.

However, starchy vegetables, such as peas and corn, were associated with weight gain. Here, the scientists tapped into large categories of study members who were required every year to be very detailed about how frequently they consume more than 130 various foods, along with a broad range of vegetables and fruits.

These findings may not be generalizable-nearly all the participants were well-educated white adults, and the use of dietary questionnaires and self-reported weight measurement may have introduced measurement errors.

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