Do you have questions about nutrition? Send them to us at comer@lavanguardia.es, our nutritionist Aitor Sánchez will answer all your questions.
Is tonic a healthy drink? (Laia Prieto, reader)
Hello Laia,
We should consider tonic water as a regular soft drink, without much difference from the rest of the category.
The truth is that it is a very striking case of how a product has managed to surround itself with a completely unjustified halo of health, explained by historical and cultural reasons.
Despite the bitter taste of the tonic, you can see in its composition that it has a large amount of sugar, similar to that of other soft drinks.
It is also often heard in popular beliefs that it is good for digestion, but it is not at all true, the amount of sugar and carbonic acid they have are not good companions for light digestion.
As an anecdote, it is worth saying that tonic began to be used as a prophylaxis against malaria. It is a drink that has a large amount of quinine, a substance that prevented malaria, which is why it was developed.
We should not recommend its consumption for health reasons and it should be just as discouraged as any other soft drink.
Do I have to eliminate cooked potatoes from my diet? I read a few days ago that they have a high glycemic index and can increase the risk of diabetes and I don't know if it is true. (Arturo Nuñez, reader)
Hi Arturo,
Cooked potatoes are not a priority food to eliminate in diets, neither in the prevention nor in the management of diabetes.
These ideas about them are tremendously simplistic and are due to information that only measures the glycemic index of foods.
The glycemic index is a fairly outdated measurement in nutrition since it can only be applied to foods that have carbohydrates and is also measured in isolation. It also does not tell us about the total amount of carbohydrates in the product but only about the speed with which its sugar is absorbed.
It therefore has so many limitations that its use was relegated, it was replaced by the glycemic load, which does take into account the total amount of carbohydrates that that food has.
Currently the vision of diabetes is much more comprehensive and no longer revolves around such a simplistic discourse.
The recommendation would be to be able to eat cooked potatoes accompanied by protein foods and a good base of vegetables. And of course consider it like any other source of healthy carbohydrates, just as we would do with legumes, fruits or whole grains.
It should be noted that cooked or roasted potatoes are also one of the most satiating foods that exist. So it can have a place in this eating model and many others, especially if the recommendations I have given are followed.
I wish we had all this concern that exists around potatoes with other products that are much more harmful to diabetes: such as cookies, pastries, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages or sausages.
