Looking for a healthy dinner

Dinner is perhaps the most controversial meal of the day. Followers of fashionable diets prefer not to eat at all after six. Popular wisdom agrees with them: “give dinner to the enemy.” Nutritionists are less categorical: “dinner should be light.” But Australian scientists claim that a late raid on the refrigerator is an excellent remedy for combating insomnia.

National traditions regarding dinner also vary. In Anglo-Saxon countries, dinner is a nutritionist's nightmare: salads, meat, potatoes and dessert. True, it usually occurs at six or seven o’clock in the evening, so it at least partially has time to be digested before going to bed. Severe Scandinavians also have a heavy dinner, but their meals are lighter, if only due to the fact that traditional fish most often appears on the table, and the dinner time is shifted closer to five hours. Latin Americans dine very late even by our standards - sometimes around ten o'clock in the evening, and their menu is dominated by vegetables and grilled meat. The healthiest of dinners is Japanese - small portions and low-calorie dishes simultaneously satisfy hunger and give the body a night's respite.

To eat or not to eat?

While girls on forums complain about the refrigerator (the closer to midnight, the more attractive its contents) and share fantastic stories about how the waist can be halved just because of refusing an evening meal, doctors say: dinner is a healthy thing and not it's even harmful. Nutritionists and gastroenterologists are unanimous - it is necessary to have dinner, but it is advisable to do it wisely. However, there is a nuance: a bad dinner is still worse than no dinner.

Dinner is the enemy

If the last meal accounts for almost half of the food consumed per day, if fried meat sits next to potatoes and mayonnaise salad on the plate, and dessert in the form of a cake is decorously waiting its turn, it is better to immediately give this dinner to the enemy in full accordance with folk wisdom.

The worst foods for dinner: fried meats, potatoes, bread, beans, baked goods, sweets and all kinds of sugary carbonated drinks. The latter, however, will not be useful even at breakfast.

Dinner-friend

Sit down at the table four hours before bedtime and eat no more than 20% of your daily calories (the daily requirement of an adult, depending on age, gender, lifestyle and other factors, is from 2500 to 4500 thousand calories). On the plate - low-fat and low-calorie, in the glass - unsweetened and caffeine-free. For an evening meal, those foods are suitable that, by the time you fall asleep, manage to emigrate from the stomach to the intestines.

Fermented milk products, natural yoghurts, weak broths, soft-boiled eggs, omelettes and unsweetened fruits (if the latter are eaten on an empty stomach) are retained in the stomach the least - for 1-2 hours. A little longer - from 2 to 4 hours - fish, lean unfried meat, rice, boiled potatoes, sweet fruits, vegetables (except legumes) and salads remain in the stomach. And for a very long time - more than 4 hours - fatty and fried meats, fatty fish (for example, herring or mackerel), beans, as well as all kinds of combinations of protein (meat, fish, cottage cheese) and starchy (bread, pasta, porridge, potatoes) await transit. products.

It is also worth considering that fats and animal protein are less absorbed in the evening, so it is better to give preference at dinner to vegetable proteins and “proper” carbohydrates with a low hypoglycemic index.

Thus, for a healthy dinner the following will do: fermented milk products, green vegetables, boiled or baked fish (meat) or, instead of all this, an abundance of fruit.

True, life makes its own adjustments to nutritionists’ theories. Firstly, it is not always possible to avoid gastronomic temptations in the evening. Secondly, for many, dinner is the only opportunity to eat properly all day. And finally, you need to enjoy food, and praise the evening