Bananas on a FODMAP Diet
The problem with bananas and low FODMAP diets occur with oligos. These are short chains of sugar and are found in a lot of surprising foods including many high FODMAP foods like onions, wheat and garlic.
The specific oligos that are in bananas are oligo-fructans, the sugar in the banana that makes it sweet. The riper the banana is the more fructose and oligos they contain. This is why you can’t simply say that bananas are high or low FODMAP.
So, bananas can be either low or high FODMAP and if you want to include them in your diet you need to choose unripe bananas and pick a small banana to eat as one serving rather than a medium or large banana.
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Recommended Banana Portion
Once you have picked out unripe bananas next you need to know just how much you can eat. To keep within low FODMAP diet requirements you should only eat a small banana that is less than 100 grams in weight.
Make sure you remove the skin before weighing as it is the flesh you eat that needs weighing rather than the whole thing, including the peel.
How to Use Bananas
You can always eat your banana as a snack as it is or for a quick and easy breakfast on the go but you can use it to make other meals a little more interesting and add some much needed natural sweetness to meals.
Make Low FODMAP Banana Bread – Banana bread has been a popular baking recipe in recent times and you can make yourself a delicious low FODMAP version! There are plenty of recipes available so find one that uses ingredients that you can eat and bake yourself some delicious banana bread as a treat.
Add Banana to Your Porridge Or Cereal – Slice up your banana and add it to your oats in the morning. This adds natural sweetness as well as all that great nutrition contained in the bananas! If you like your porridge sweet then you can still add a little of your usual sweetener but you may find that the banana is enough to satisfy those sweet cravings.
Add Banana to Your Baking – As already mentioned, the banana makes a fantastic natural sweetener and you can also add it into your cakes to make delicious sweet cakes. Not only do you get the benefit of the banana flavour but you should also be able to reduce the amount of your usual sugar you add into the cake mixture.
Quick Summary
Bananas are not easy to categorise as low or high FODMAP because they can be both! Ripe bananas are considered high fodmap and you should avoid these as much as possible on a low FODMAP diet.
However, you should be able to eat small amounts of unripe bananas. So pick out a small, hardly ripe banana and add it to your meals or eat it as a snack.
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