We love them for breakfast, but pastries also have a reputation for making us gain weight. Can it be healthy to eat it every day? Should you restrict yourself to eating it only occasionally? The clear-cut answer from an expert.
That we are rather croissant Or chocolate bread (Or chocolatine depending on the region), or that we still prefer the tendentious Raisin bread which never brings everyone into agreement, the pastries are essential items on the table breakfast French, often copied around the world but never equalled. Almost as emblematic as the traditional baguette, pastries are, like them, the subject of many prejudices when it comes to nutrition.
Accused of being too high in calories to be healthy, some consume them very occasionally, while others can’t imagine a morning without biting into their flaky, well-buttered pastry… What is it really? What is the best healthy habit to adopt when it comes to eating pastries? Mégane Heudiard, a dietitian nutritionisthas shattered preconceived ideas about croissants, pain au chocolat and other pastries by revealing the exact number of these bakery treats that you can really eat during the week at Madame Figaro.
The rest after this ad
Pastries: breakfast foods that do not meet our nutritional needs
Not very interesting from a nutritional point of view, pastries do not constitute a sufficient source of vitamins or minerals, “except for a few B vitamins provided by flour, provitamins A contained in butter and a few minerals linked to the presence of sodium”, warns the expert.
Eating a pastry is therefore more about treating yourself, and not really about meeting your daily needs as we sometimes think we do by biting into a pain au chocolat which keeps us satisfied until lunch.
The rest after this ad
Salt, fat, sugar: the hidden substances in our pastries that cause problems
However, pastries are foods very rich in sugar, salt and fat, which weigh heavily in our daily intake in the morning. According to the Ciqual food nutritional composition table, a pastry contains on average 12.8 g of sugar per 100g, which already covers a good part of the maximum daily sugar intake recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) , which are 50 g per day.
This does not get better with their salt content, on average 1.04 g per 100g of pastries according to the same nutritional table, which indicates that eating a croissant or a pain au chocolat already fills a good part of the dose of salt we should consume per day for health, which is less than 5 grams of salt per day. Finally, pastries also contain a lot of saturated fatty acids, the consumption of which should be reduced for health reasons. Eating too many pastries “increases the risk of dental caries, overweight, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease”warns Mégane Heudiard.
The rest after this ad
How many pastries can you eat per week without gaining weight?
This does not mean, however, that we should deprive ourselves of it, quite the contrary according to the expert who specifies that “the more we forbid ourselves from a food, the more likely we are to eat it out of compulsion and sometimes in larger quantities”.
To avoid this, Mégane Heudiard certainly recommends consuming them “occasionally”but she assures that this allows you to eat a pastry “once or twice a week”without them having “no impact on our nutritional balance, our health and our weight”. So limit yourself to 1 or 2 croissants or pain au chocolat per week to enjoy yourself and take care of your health, without depriving yourself!
Makeup, skincare, hair care, manicure…, Elodie deciphers the beauty trends of the moment and finds you the best products and good deals so that you can perfect your routine…