Behold the magical food: fat-free! Fat free? So does that mean healthy? Unfortunately, as we’ve said before, fat isn’t the whole picture. These days you can find fat-free cakes, brownies, and cookies at the grocery store. However, take a look at the calorie count, and the sugar and sodium. Calories rule. When you are trying to lose weight, it is about calorie in, calorie out.
Fat-free foods may be a part of a healthy diet, but cannot be eaten with reckless abandon if you are getting hit with too many calories.
Another ingredient I personally like to avoid is high-fructose corn syrup. For one reason, the words themselves scare me. Sounds to me like it is sugar that is extremely high in sugar. Since we are not doctors, we’re not going to get into the studies that link high-fructose corn syrup to weight gain, high blood pressure, and other health problems, but instead we’ll let some examples of foods high in high-fructose corn syrup speak for themselves: soda, candy, cookies, cakes, jam, jellies, pancake syrup, sweetened cereals. Sounds like those fall into the “use very sparingly” category to us.
Sparingly, by the way, is “once in a while” not “I’ll only drink two sodas today instead of five.”
You may also want to keep your eye on sodium content as it has been linked to high blood pressure. The daily limit is set at 1,500-2,300 milligrams. Though this may sound like a high number, sodium seems to be in everything. According to their website, a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup has 890 milligrams of sodium per serving, a half a cup of condensed soup. The standard sized can says it contains 2.5 servings. That means eating one can of soup gets you just about to the daily limit. So don’t even think about those salted crackers on top! At Fantasy Healthball’s Diet and Nutrition section, we aren’t militant about what you can and can’t eat. We just want you to be smart about it by knowing what is going in your mouth and what it is going to do once it gets in your body. - Jim Ballard
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December 14, 2008 at 10:46 am |
also look for “hidden” high fructose corn syrup added to savory (or salty, meaty, not sugary foods) including salad dressings, canned foods, pre-packed foods, lunch meats…food items you wouldn’t have thought contained the “uber” sugar.
April 18, 2009 at 7:39 pm |
[...] these sweeteners “sugar on steriods.” Sucralose is about 600 times as sweet as table sugar. It is about twice as sweet as saccharin or Stevia, over three times as sweet as aspartame, and [...]