A doctor has recommended eating green bananas for their health benefits. It may sound strange but according to one expert under ripe bananas could work wonders for your gut health.
And it is not just green bananas that could have these benefits but a number of other specific foods such as cooked and cooled potatoes, and raw oats. This is because they contain something known as resistant starch.
NHS surgeon Doctor Karan Raj, better known online as Dr Raj, took to social media platform TikTok to explain more. To illustrate his point he first showed another content creator’s video who claimed recooked rice helped him manage his blood sugar levels.
The video said: “Here’s a simple trick that helped me manage my pre-diabetes. Cooking, cooling and even freezing rice. When you cook rice, the heat makes starch molecules absorb water and swell.
“This makes rice soft and easy to digest, but when you cool and freeze the rice, the starch molecules reorganise into a crystalline structure. This forms what’s called resistant starch.”
Dr Raj explained that there are other ways to get resistant starch into your diet. “If you want more resistant starch in your diet but don’t just want to eat rice, you can do this. Resistant starch not only helps to feed your existing good gut bacteria but also helps to increase their numbers too.”
He said there are five different types of resistant starch and “you want to try and get a mix of them” for good gut health.
“Resistant starch one – you can get this from whole grain seeds, nuts beans, pulses and legumes. Resistant starch two and my personal favourite, you can find these in things like raw potatoes, under ripe green bananas, or raw plantain.”
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He continued: “I’m not suggesting you eat raw potatoes, but I like to blend under ripe bananas to smoothies to get that resistant starch without affecting the taste. Or you can add uncooked oats to any type of milk overnight to get a cold oatmeal dish AKA overnight oats.
“Basically, the less you cook foods with type two resistant starch the more that you retain. Resistant starch three is the one you hear all about – retrograde starch, take a carb, heat it up, and cool it down, you get type three resistant starch.
“You can do this with potatoes, rice bread, pasta, noodles.”
He added that type four resistant starch doesn’t occur naturally and that not enough is known about the gut health benefits of type five.
He added: “But when it comes to gut health, diversity is key. So I’d recommend trying to get a healthy mix of the first three types of resistant starch to support a diversity of bacteria.”
Doctors at UCLA Health explain that resistant starch can have a number of health benefits, even lowering the risk of cancer. “Studies have found diets that include resistant starch help with blood sugar control, yield more healthful blood lipid levels and improve feelings of satiety after eating,” they said. “They have also been linked to lower risk for colon cancer. As bacteria in the gut ferment resistant starch, they create compounds known as short-chain fatty acids.
“These include butyrate and propionate. The former is associated with lower rates of colorectal cancers. Propionate has been shown to lower inflammation in the body and also improve immune support.”
They added that it has also been found that cooking and then cooling certain high-carb foods transforms those carbs into resistant starch. “These include rice, potatoes, yams, whole grains such as oats and barley, and pasta,” they said.
“Someone looking to increase their consumption of resistant starch should consider allowing those foods to cool completely before consuming them. Research shows that for the first four days after cooking, each chill day increases the percentage of resistant starch.”