Diet is a huge part of our overall health and wellbeing. Not only does what we eat have a massive impact on our weight, it can also affect our risk for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, dementia and even cancer.
Therefore, making healthier choices in our day-to-day life is vital, and potentially even life extending.
Overhauling your diet can be easier said than done though, especially if time or cost is a concern.
However, one health expert revealed two simple swaps you can make in your diet that have multiple benefits.
Speaking on Instagram, Professor Tim Spector – one of the founders of Zoe Health, revealed a couple of changes he has made himself to lower his blood sugar.
He explained how he has switched out regular pasta with wholegrain, lentil or chickpea pasta.
Prof Spector has also ditched white rice in favour of brown rice, quinoa, bulgar wheat or pearl barley.
“I used to eat a lot of regular pasta, and I’ve now swapped that for either whole grains and sometimes to things like lentil pastas, or chickpea pastas because they’re producing much less of a sugar spike for me and that are higher in fibre and that’s helpful for my gut microbes,” he said.
“So I’ve really made that switch, which I find very easy and still super tasty.”
Upping your fibre intake is a simple thing you can do to protect yourself from multiple health issues, including high cholesterol and blood sugar.
The NHS explains: “Most of us need to eat more fibre and have fewer added sugars in our diet.
“Eating plenty of fibre is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and bowel cancer.
“Government guidelines say our dietary fibre intake should increase to 30 grams a day, as part of a healthy balanced diet.
“As most adults are only eating an average of about 20g a day, we need to find ways of increasing our intake.”
Prof Spector continued: “The other thing that I’ve done is pretty much reduced my consumption of white rice. I still like it occasionally.
“But I found that brown rice isn’t that much better for me and so I wherever I can, I’ve made the swap to go to other grains and if you can get a mix of grains that’s even better, because they have much higher levels of both protein and fibre than anything that rice can offer.
“And that diversity is really important because they’ve also got other polyphenols and great things about it.
“So just by making a couple of swaps, I’ve managed to really improve all things in my diet and actually, it makes it tastier as well.”
According to Prof Spector, a standard white pasta will provide around 3.5g of fibre per 100g.
Swapping to whole grain wheat pasta increases this to over five grams and choosing pasta made from chickpeas increases this to nine grams with 22g of protein per 100g.
He claimed that white rice has less than one gram of fibre per 100g, brown rice has 1.5g of fibre per 100g, quinoa and bulgur wheat have around 2.3g, pearl barley has 5.4g.