1. Ensure Starchy Foods Are Your Meal Base

Starchy foods include cereals, bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. They are an essential part of a well balanced, healthy diet. Whenever possible, opt for wholegrain variations of starchy foods.

Starchy foods ought to form a third of your diet. They are an excellent source of energy, providing an entire variety of nutrients crucial for your diet. Other than the self evident starch, such foods contain iron, calcium, fibre and B vitamins.

It is important to eat a minimum of one starchy food per meal. Thus you could have a wholegrain breakfast cereal, sandwich at lunch time, and pasta, potatoes, or rice at dinner time.

A lot of us may consider starchy foods to be fattening, yet gram for gram they have half the calories of fat. Be careful how much oil or butter you add when you are cooking and serving such foods, as this increases the calorie content.

Why Select Wholegrain Foods?

Wholegrain foods consist of more fibre, as well as other nutrients than refined or white, starchy foods.

Wholegrain foods take longer to digest. Hence, they make you feel full for longer. Therefore, they are crucial for a healthy, well balanced diet.

Wholegrain foods include:

• Wholegrain breakfast cereals
• Wholegrain bread
• Wholemeal bread
• Chapatti and pitta breads
• Brown rice
• Wholewheat pasta
  

Starchy foods tend to form the basis of most meals in the Greek Mediterranean Diet.
Starchy foods have the benefit of being filling and contain good amounts of nutrients and naturally-occurring disease-fighting chemicals phytochemicals, particularly if wholegrain varieties are chosen, such as whole-wheat pasta, granary bread and brown rice. Unfortunately, when grains are refined, for example to make white flour or white rice, the outer bran and germ layers of the grain are stripped away – also removing the fibre, nutrients and phytochemicals, which are concentrated in these areas.

Wholegrain starchy foods help to keep the heart healthy – research suggests that people who eat at least three servings of wholegrains a day are less likely to suffer from heart disease, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer.