No Flour & No Sugar Fructose Diet

If you are concerned with your weight, want to prevent or better control your diabetes, want to lower your triglyceride levels or simply want to have more energy, a diet eliminating flour, sugar and fructose is a good choice. A no-flour, no-sugar and no-fructose diet would be the equivalent of a low-carb diet, which has been shown to help with weight loss, blood lipid profile and blood sugar level control. By helping you keep your blood sugar levels more even, this type of diet can help you have more energy between meals. Before making any dietary changes, consult your doctor.

Flour

Flour is mostly in processed foods that are packaged in a box, often along with many unfamiliar ingredients. Flour is rich in starch, a type of carbohydrate that once digested becomes glucose, or sugar, and raises your blood sugar levels just like sugar-containing foods. Flour is in bread, pasta, buns, pitas, tortillas, cakes, cookies, croissants, bagels, pizza dough, crackers, breakfast cereals, granola bars and all baked goods. Eliminate these foods, whether they are made from refined or whole grain flour, for a month to see whether it helps you feel better and meet your objectives.

Sugar

Sugar is also present in many processed and refined foods. Sugar appears under many forms, including table sugar, honey, fruit juice concentrates, dehydrated cane juice, molasses, dextrin, maltodextrin, agave syrup, maple syrup or corn syrup. Always read the ingredient lists of a food before putting it in your grocery cart and avoid any of the foods containing ingredients that are synonymous with sugar. Sugar and most foods containing sugar are empty calories and you will do better without them. Sugar is in sweets, candies, desserts, baked goods, soft drinks, fruit punches, breakfast cereals, granola bars, chocolate milk and even in bread and bacon.

Fructose

Fructose is a sugar that is naturally a part of fruits, but that also constitutes half of the sugar in sweeteners like table sugar. Robert Lustig, a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, refers to fructose as a "poison" that is responsible for the epidemic of diabetes and obesity in the US. Although fructose is in fruits, the increase in fructose consumption is mainly due to the increased consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in sweets, desserts and soft drinks.

What To Eat

If you decide to cut off foods containing flour, sugar and fructose from your diet, you may wonder what you will be eating. Fortunately, plenty of nutritious food is left for you to include in your diet, including vegetables and tubers; protein from eggs, cheese, meat, poultry, fish, milk and yogurt; and fat from olive oil, coconut, avocado, nuts, seeds and their butter. For example, you could have steel-cut oats with plain yogurt and peanut butter or cheesy scrambled eggs with spinach and mushrooms. For lunch, have a big salad filled with leafy greens, avocado, walnuts and chicken or fish drizzled with an olive oil vinaigrette. For dinner, you can have pork chops with a generous servings of broccoli, asparagus or green beans drizzled with olive oil. Snack on nuts, seeds, hard-boiled eggs, smoked salmon, canned tuna, plain yogurt or raw vegetables dipped in hummus.