Fruit flies like a banana. - Lisa Grossman
Two people told me today that eating too many bananas is like eating too many chocolate bars. My words, not their;s, but the implication was that bananas will make me (f a t) - something I'm trying to avoid. I've taken to trying to eat better - actually, that's an understatement - I'm trying to eat a whole lot better. Naturally, hearing that one of my main sources of nutrition is going to make me bigger was rather distressing.
Thankfully, the font of all trivia worth pondering, the internet, is close at hand.
First off, Google tells me that the lowly potato has a higher nutritive value than wheat when you compare the average energy and protein production on a per hectare per day basis...neat.
And despite the fact that the FAO says that cassava root isn't that great for human babies, the Department of Animal Science Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria says that its a-ok for baby chicks.
But back to bananas. The USDA has a great primer describing how to pick out the cherries from the lemons...I mean the good ones from the bad ones, Oregon State has a ton of pointers (including some yummy looking recipes) and Wayne has 104 banana recipes - my favorite recipe site only has 38.
But Wayne offers something that Recipesource doesn't;
To show my interest in bananas, I researched their nutritional value, as compared to apples. A banana has less water, fifty percent more food energy, four times the protein, half the fat, twice the carbohydrate, almost three times the phosphorus, nearly five times the Vitamin A and iron, at least twice the other vitamins and minerals as an apple. That's how I got my respect for bananas.
Wow.
I'm not sure if I should care about reaching for that second or third banana anymore. Check out this chart, also from Wayne's page, that does a head to head comparison of apples and bananas. Knowing this would make me feel guilty about passing on something that performs this well in all categories...
Let me know if you find any answers more concise than this. I'm going to have a banana while I wait for someone else to find the answer.
Many people advocate a low-carb diet in order to lose weight and regulate blood chemistry. (Some say "high protein", but I think that's a misnomer...the important thing in most of those diets is reduction of carbs).
Anyway, there are carbs, and then there's fiber. Fiber counts toward the carbs in a food, but it's not processed the same way by the body. Most carbs are processed essentially the same way that pure sugar is. Fiber is unusual in that it does not have the same impact (chemically) that other carbs do, so for all intents and purposes, it's inert. In fact, in Protein Power*, Drs. Eades use a concept of "ECC," or "Effective Carbohydrate Count" to take this into account...ECC is simply total carbs less fiber.
SO...
If you're interested in low-carbs, an Apple aces out a Banana every day of the week.
From http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl, we find the following:
1 Medium Banana
- 109 Calories
- 1.215g of Protein
- 27.647g of Carbs
- 2.832g of Fiber
- 0.566g of Fat
- ECC: 24.815g
1 Medium Apple
- 81 calories
- 0.262g of Protein
- 21.045g of Carbs
- 3.726g of Fiber
- 0.497g of Fat
- ECC: 17.319g
So, you save 7.5g of carbs by eating the Apple, plus you get the benefit of all that fiber (you should be eating something like 25g of fiber a day) that you wouldn't get in the banana.
But hey, that's all academic. I like bananas.
:)
* Protein Power: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553574752/qid=1055906368/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_3/002-1435660-7888049?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Well today's lunch bag has one banana, two pears and a peach - I'm gonna hedge a little bit further and swap and apple in for one of the pears tomorrow. :)