As it is with many industries, food industry inclusive, practitioners always try to hype the benefits of certain food items, with the aim of driving sales. Overtime, these popular foods become trendy, and people naturally fall in love with them, taking them as healthy foods. However, investigations have revealed that not all common foods are healthy.
A survey at Nuts.com revealed a list of such common foods, which may not be healthy for you. Below are some of them:
- Banana chips were promoted as a perfect substitute for sweets. Why eat 300 grams of chocolate, when you can enjoy a healthy banana snack. Banana is healthy after all, right? The thing is banana chips are made by deep frying bananas. Just one serving of banana chips contains about 10 grams of saturated fat, which has an awful impact on our cholesterol levels. Take a fresh banana instead, and you will be very satisfied!
2. Energy bars are often placed in food aisles reserved for healthy foods and foods that help weight loss. However, energy bars are not for weight loss. Not only they are not healthy, but they can even be worse than most candy bars. The reason for this is because they basically encourage the body to store fat and calories in your body. One energy bar contains about 500 calories, which is the same amount of calories a lunch or dinner should have. Keep that in mind next time you reach for an energy bar.
3. When people want to lose weight, they often search for products which contain less fat, which is normal. That’s why they choose low fat yogurt and believe they did something good for their bodies. This is absolutely not true. When you significantly reduce fat in a product, that product becomes pretty tasteless. The problems with light yogurt begin with the artificial sweeteners added to them, but that is not where they end. Other problems include the addition of modified corn starches, preservatives, and artificial colors. This may leave you with the impression that plain yogurt is the best alternative, which would be partly right. Plain yogurt is preferable to light or flavored yogurt, but it has its own drawbacks as well. If you do go with plain yogurt, you can add honey or vanilla to flavor it. In order to compensate, yogurt manufacturers add sugars and make a low fat yogurt- filled with sugar!
4. If your body is rejecting gluten because of a disease, then eating gluten-free products is something you have to do, in order to stay alive. However, the rest of the people who have no problem with gluten kind of waste their money on gluten-free products. Gluten-free products are highly refined and they often don’t contain whole grain. Because of this, gluten-free foods are lower in fiber and antioxidant compounds. So if you don’t actually need gluten-free foods, don’t buy it!
5. Sports drinks are not healthy, folks. But really, anything with these color dyes couldn’t be healthy, not on this planet. People usually say they are healthy because they are better than soda. Well, that doesn’t make them good, considering sodas are pure evil made of nothing but sugar and chemicals. Besides sugar, sports drinks contain many dyes and preservatives because of which they have been banned in Europe and Japan.
6. Whole grains are healthy for us because they contain fibers and B vitamin. However, be careful of “multigrain” and “wheat” products you see in stores, because manufacturers use them for products which don’t actually contain whole grains. The whole difference between a whole and refined grain is: whole grains contain all parts of the kernel. Refined grains have finer texture, they last longer but they also have less qualities for our health.
7. When you make a smoothie at home, you are doing the right thing. There is hardly anything better for your body than natural juices of fruits and vegetables, all mixed together. At home, you are the chief of your smoothie- you add what you want to do. However, most of us don’t have time for making smoothies, or we just forget about them. That is, until we see store selling smoothies. Be careful though, those smoothies might have more sugar than you think.
8. Remember popcorn diets? They were very popular and no wonder, really- everybody loves popcorn! However, microwave popcorn is not the best solution for anyone. Microwave popcorn contains a substance called diacetyl, which is added to almost all artificial butters. It is tasty but unfortunately, also very dangerous. Diacetyl is safe when you eat it, but it is dangerous when you inhale it. So when you heat a bag of popcorn, diacetyl is easily inhaled.
9. Frozen dinners are often the best solution for people who have no time or money to cook every day. There is one thing you need to know about them- frozen dinners are not healthy. They are actually high in salt! Processed food is not tasty at all. In order to make it tasty, manufacturers add salt, sugar and fat. Frozen dinners are high in salt but short on nutrients and they almost never include whole grains.
10. Nuts contain many nutrients which improve our health and help people fight weight gain. When turned into butter, these properties are, unfortunately, completely lost. Through processing, nut butters lose their natural fats and gain some less healthy fats. They also get more salt and sugar but also, preservatives and coloring substances. If you really must use nut butter, use almond butter instead.
11. Dried fruits are great- when you dry them at home. If you do that, dried fruits still contain all vitamins, fiber and minerals. However, when you buy them in store, you are buying a bunch of sugar. In order to make dried fruit taste better, manufacturers add sucrose or table sugar. Also, they add sulfur to prevent browning of the fruits. These additives and sugars can be dangerous to our health, and they definitely don’t help us lose weight.
12. Prepared Salads: When you order a salad at a restaurant, you probably think that you are treating your body properly and showing remarkable restraint.
Lamentably, while some salads are truly good for you, most of them can be just as bad as the burger you yearned to order the first place. What is worse, since they don’t fill you up, you’re likely to order that burger anyway.
The most popular salads found in restaurants will often be drowned in extra fats and calories so that consumers will find them tastier.
In many cases, these salads are particularly unhealthy due to the chef’s decision to add huge amounts of mayonnaise (which is high in both calories and fat).
- Brown Sugar: It was once claimed that brown sugar is healthier than white sugar because it is more natural and less processed.
Both, however, are primarily made of sucrose and so there is very little difference between the two. In fact, brown sugar is nothing more than white sugar with molasses added to it.
Light brown sugar is 3.5% molasses while dark brown sugar is 6.5% molasses.
The problem gets worse though because not all sucrose is the same. Sucrose made from cane sugar will be naturally brown, while that made from beet sugar is not naturally brown.
To make beet sugar brown, it is first sprayed with a coating of molasses that is highly processed. If the coloration of a sugar comes off on your hands, then you can be sure that it was sprayed to create the brown color.
It is true that molasses contains a few vitamins and minerals, but the content is too low to really make the product healthy. It certainly isn’t enough to make sucrose healthy. In the end, the need to add molasses to create brown sugar means that the product is actually more processed than white sugar. It’s a bit ironic. In the end, sucrose is sucrose, so avoid it as much as possible.
