There's so many healthy foods out right now, but beware some of these are healthy fakes.
Let's
start with the foods that you pick up as a healthy alternative to a
fatty snack like potato chips, rice cakes. Frankly, rice cakes taste
healthy. There's very little to them, they're bland and one mini cake
isn't nearly enough to curb an appetite. Rice cakes contain no nutrition, just sodium. If you select one of the tastier types, you'll find these have the bad fat, Trans fat.
Therefore,
you pass on the rice cakes but decide a health food bar is more to your
liking. Beware, there's a lot that these bars hide underneath their
packaged promises.
First, if they taste good, they contain
sugar, but that's mostly in granola bars. Sugar raises the insulin
level, which stops the body from releasing growth hormones. In turn, the
reduction growth hormones released causes the immune system to be
depressed. Sugar also elevates your blood sugar level, makes the
pancreas work frantically to produce insulin and then the level drops
dramatically. These rapid changes in the blood sugar add additional
stress on your body.
Okay, you don't want a healthy fake
no matter how good it tastes so you check the ingredients for every type
of sugar that you know and your bar passes with flying colors. However,
the label shows the bar contains soy rice crisp or soy protein.
Soy
is healthy, right? Wrong! According to a not for profit nutritional
education organization, the Weston A Price Foundation in Washington DC,
processed soy protein and soy oil that you find in many health food
products shows a direct link to problems with the thyroid, digestive
tract, reproductive organs including infertility, dementia, heart
disease, ADD/ADHD and even a direct link to cancer.
Women
that are at risk for breast cancer are warned to cut back on soy
products because of the ever increasing evidence that diets high in soy
products causes a greater amount of cells to multiply in the breast.
What can you eat as a healthy snack?
Either select something that your mother made, by that I mean Mother
Nature, or make it yourself so you know what the snack contains. Good wholesome fresh fruit, nuts, berries and seeds. Mix them together with some shredded wheat and you have homemade trail mix you can trust.
Drinks
are deceptive also; there are many healthy fakes that pass themselves
off as "good for you" and nutritious. Vitamin drinks offer a lot of
healthy vitamins but also have an abundance of sugar.
These
drinks contain as much as 8 teaspoons of sugar. Even though the
vitamins enhance your immune system, the sugar in the drink suppresses
it. Three teaspoons of sugar can suppress your immune system for up to
four hours.
These have almost three times the amount of
sugar. Twenty years ago, the average consumption of sugar was 26 pounds a
year. Today the consumption has risen to an unprecedented 135 pounds
per American, per year.
Is it any wonder that cancer and
heart disease is on the rise, not to mention the increased number of
Americans that even make their sweat pants scream under the strain of
the extra body weight.
Bottled tea, even the unsweetened
type, is also another healthy fake. Studies show that bottled tea
contains no where near the antioxidants that brewed tea contains.
There are so many healthy fakes on the market everywhere you look. Why? Marketing. Manufacturers and fast food restaurants all know Americans want to eat healthy and now promote that with somewhat deceptive labeling. The easiest way to healthy eating is making the food, reading all labels and avoiding anything with sugars or corn syrup in the first 8 ingredients on the label. Next time you go shopping, read the labels and find some healthy fakes yourself.
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