I love bananas. They are one of my favorite fruits. My basic smoothie recipe is one cup of yogurt, a banana, and whatever fruit is in season. I put them on my oatmeal. I bake with them. I freeze them and eat them like ice cream. So it always bothers me to see nutrition and fitness experts steer people away from bananas. Apparently they are too high in carbohydrate. If you DO get permission to eat one…you have to cut it in half. (Like who is going to eat the other half the next day when it's all brown?) My theory has always been, if you eat a banana, you get fiber, and you get vitamins and minerals, so you get a whole lot more than carbohydrates. And if you eat a banana, it is filling enough that you are less likely to be hungry for other, less nutritious carbohydrates. So last week, when I saw bananas hit the newswires, for a good reason, I was excited! A new study tested the athletic performance of people eating bananas vs. those using sports drinks. And the bananas won out. Of course they did. Mother Nature designed them. There are people, a lot of them, who devote their lives to creating the ultimate nutrition supplement. There are labs with hundreds of thousands of dollars devoted to researching whether or not those supplements should contain vitamin M, mineral T, or antioxidant Y. And the banana, the fruit we've been telling people to stay away from, was the secret weapon all along. By the way, if you're like me and you like bananas when they're still a little green without any brown spots, you're getting an additional type of carbohydrate--resistant starch. This type of carbohydrate passes through the stomach undigested and is not processed until it ferments in the large intestine. The resulting byproduct is a prebiotic, meaning it feeds healthy bacteria and promotes calcium absorption. It may even promote weight loss, because carbohydrates your body uses as resistant starch yield fewer calories than calories that do not.
So before you take bananas out of your diet because a trainer who heard it from another trainer who heard it at the gym from someone who read it on a website told you not to eat them…take a look at the research. I think this guy knows a lot more than personal trainers who have nothing to gain and money to lose if you eat bananas instead of earning them commission and endorsement money on some artificial supplement. Has Mother Nature ever packaged anything with bad intent?