Healthy eating has become popular and even trendy. Adherents of the right lifestyle urge to give up heavy food and eat light food, but it is not always clear what is behind these definitions. Heavy foods are foods that take a long time to digest and contain a lot of calories.
Heavy food
There is a widespread belief that foods that do not exist naturally in nature can be considered heavy food. All kinds of semi-finished products (dumplings, dumplings, pasta, spring rolls), pasta, sausages - all this is really heavy food, but it does not stand out in this group because such food does not grow on trees.
Bananas, pears, nuts, according to this classification, should be considered light food, but in fact they are not.
The first sign of a heavy meal is its high calorie content. The number of calories does not depend on the method of preparation: both nuts and hamburgers are very high in calories. This is not to say that heavy food is just fast food and everything deep-fried or fried, but on the other hand, fast food and the like are always heavy food.
A large number of calories are found in many fruits and berries - bananas, avocados, grapes. Nuts are one of the record holders for energy content: there are more than 600 kilocalories in one hundred grams, which is more than in many types of meat.
For the same reason, meat, almost all animal products, except for low-fat fermented milk and milk products, mushrooms, almost all sweets, especially chocolate, cakes and pies with flour, butter and sugar in the composition, sweet carbonated drinks can be called heavy food.
The second sign of heavy food is its slow and difficult digestion in the human stomach. Here, not only the chemical composition of the products is important, but also the method of their preparation. So, for example, soft-boiled eggs are easier to digest than scrambled eggs, so the first option is light food, and the second is heavy. Hard, fatty, spicy, salty foods are poorly digested. For this reason, rich soups and broths, fried foods (even if light foods are fried), everything deep-fried, pickles are all heavy foods. Legumes, wholemeal flour products, and unripe fruits are also slowly and poorly digested.
Coarse flour or whole grain flour is considered healthy, but it is highly irritating to the digestive tract.
Light food
Everything that cannot be considered heavy food belongs to light: these are low-calorie and easily digestible foods. The first group includes almost all vegetables, except for potatoes and corn: cucumbers, zucchini, beets, celery, carrots. Many fruits and berries also have a small amount of calories in their composition - these are citrus fruits, pineapple, raspberries, currants.
Foods that are easy to digest often have the consistency of liquid, mashed potatoes, and gruel. These are any soups-mashed potatoes from vegetables or low-fat meat, boiled finely chopped meat or steamed fish, vegetable puree, low-fat cottage cheese, well-boiled cereals from various cereals, jellies, sugar-free mousses.
