Mango
Sweet fruit that still does less to your blood sugar than the biscuit you would otherwise have reached for.
How to use it
As a snack in place of something out of a packet. Through a salad with lime and chilli, or alongside something savoury.
The best version
Ripe means soft at the stem and fragrant, not a colour. A green mango can be ripe and a red one can be hard.
How to prepare it
Cut alongside the flat stone, score the flesh in the skin and turn it inside out. Unripe, leave it on the worktop for a few days and never in the fridge.
What it does
In 23 people with overweight, a 100 kilocalorie snack of fresh mango was compared with a biscuit of the same size. After the mango, glucose rose less and insulin rose less, and people were less hungry and felt fuller than after the biscuit.
Watch out
The comparison was against a biscuit and not against nothing. Mango is among the sweetest fruits there is, and half a mango is not a portion of vegetables.