People these days do everything they can to be healthy and fit. They go to the gym, avoid unhealthy food, try hard to get enough sleep. They do not feel healthy enough. Why? They are consuming unhealthy food which is presented to them in disguise of healthy food.
Here’s a list of some of these unhealthy food products which prevent us from getting healthier and happier:
- Breakfast cereal- ‘Whole grain’, ‘low fat’, ‘healthy’ are all lies. What’s worse is that mostly kids have breakfast cereals. All these cereals contain is sugar, chemicals, and refined grains.
- Frozen food- Frozen food1 is a savior for many who do not have enough time to cook. They are said to be healthy and are low in fat. But then, they contain preservatives to keep them edible for a long time. Doesn’t sound so healthy now, does it?
- Multi grain- Multi grain doesn’t mean whole grain! Stop getting trolled by marketers. Multi grain may contain refined, bleached grain which is not healthy at all.
- Sugar substitutes- Sugar substitutes may result in glucose intolerance2. They also make our taste buds crave for something sweet. Not so helpful, right?
- Yogurt- Yogurt is great. It contains vitamins, protein, minerals, etc. What you need to stay away from is flavored yogurt. Your favorite cheesecake flavored yogurt contains more sugar than proteins and is going to harm you.
- Fruit and vegetable juice- Fruit juice is healthy because it is made from fruit, right? Well, they are just fruit-flavored sugar water. Green juice too is supposed to be full of nutrients, but it is again sugar water. This is obviously the packaged juice we find in supermarkets; home made juice will be healthy.
- Dried fruit- These are 100% natural and made from fruits. They are not healthy. They contain more sugar and calories than one needs to consume.
- Salad dressing- Vegetables are real healthy, but the veggie salad won’t taste as good without the dressing, right? Well, the dressing contains sugar, trans fat and artificial chemicals.
- Protein Bars- Protein bars3 are presented to us as healthy food. It seems like a great idea, we get enough nutrients from these bars that we can eat on the go, we are always in a hurry anyway. Studies tell us that eating real food is much better, it gives us the fibers we don’t get from these bars.
- Evans, Judith A., ed. Frozen food science and technology. John Wiley & Sons, 2009. ↩︎
- DeFronzo, Ralph A. “Glucose intolerance and aging.” Diabetes care 4.4 (1981): 493-501. ↩︎
- Fernan, Catherine, Jonathon P. Schuldt, and Jeff Niederdeppe. “Health halo effects from product titles and nutrient content claims in the context of “protein” bars.” Health communication 33.12 (2018): 1425-1433. ↩︎
Last Updated on by Sathi