The mainstream nutrition authorities have swindled you. Duped you. Dare I say even bamboozled you.
For years they’ve promised you that eating low fat foods, cooking your food in vegetable oil instead of butter, and choosing “healthier” versions of your favorite products would lead you to the promised land of optimal health.
Turns out they were dead wrong … and science proves it.
If you’re sick of having the wool pulled over your eyes, stick around as we explore eight “healthy foods” you should ditch right now. This is the first of two posts, and we’ll cover four foods in each.
Yogurt
Avoid yogurts with “fruit on the bottom”–they often contain several types of added sugar.
Wait, yogurt is good for you, right?
In its pure, natural form, yes.
But with many brands, you’re unwittingly indulging in more sugar than a candy bar.
1 cup of Dannon’s Fruit on the Bottom Yogurt has 4 different types of sweeteners (sugar, fructose syrup, high fructose corn syrup, purple carrot juice concentrate) that combine for a whopping 32 grams of sugar. That’s 11 more grams than a Kit Kat Bar.
Let’s say you choose Stonyfield’s Organic Nonfat Vanilla Yogurt instead. At first glance, the ingredients list looks pretty good—and it’s organic, which would lead most people to believe it’s a healthier option. But a cup of this stuff has more sugar than an entire bag of M&M’s (33 grams for the yogurt and 30 for the M&M’s).
What’s wrong with a little sugar to start your day, you may be asking?
For one, we eat more than a little–the average American gets 13 percent of their daily calories from added sugars (this doesn’t include natural sugars that come from fruits and milk).
If you have a sweet tooth, you know how addicting sugar can be—and it’s not just in your head. Sugar causes insulin resistance in your body, which leads to four of the most common pre-cursors to an early death: metabolic syndrome, obesity, cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes.
If that doesn’t deter you from your morning dessert-disguised-as-a-health-food, maybe this will: most yogurt lining grocery store shelves is filled with chemical preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and fillers.
How to Choose a Healthier Yogurt
Make sure the words “sugar”, “syrup”, or “fruit concentrate” aren’t on the ingredients list. Look for brands with a sugar to protein ratio of 1:1.
Opt for plain Greek yogurt (full fat is fine as long as it doesn’t contain added sugar). Greek yogurt has up to double the protein too. Nancy’s Organic and Siggi’s are both brands I recommend.
Low Fat Cheese
There are wood chips in here. Seriously.
The low fat craze is still alive and kicking, as evidenced by all the low fat cheese products on the market.
But isn’t less fat a good thing?
Not when you replace it with chemicals, artificial fillers, and ingredients like cellulose—which is essentially powdered wood chips.
If the idea of a cheese-and-wood-chip party in your mouth doesn’t deter you from buying low fat cheese, consider this: a 2013 research review that analyzed 16 different studies concluded:
“The relationship between high-fat dairy consumption and metabolic health reported either an inverse or no association.”
Translation: despite popular belief, high fat dairy products are NOT bad for your heart—and they don’t make you fat. In fact, in 11 out of the 16 studies, researchers found that people who ate more full fat cheese, milk, and yogurt were less likely to be fat!
How to Choose a Healthier Cheese
Full fat dairy products from pastured-raised animals are the way to go. That’s because dairy from grass-fed cows contains up to three times as many CLAs, a heart healthy type of fat.
Organic Valley and Kerrygold make some tasty cheeses that come from pastured cows.
Wheat Bread
If, like I do, you have a weakness for a loaf of warm, crusty, freshly-baked bread, here’s why you might want to consider politely declining the bread basket next time you’re out to eat: eating refined grains is directly associated with a higher level of visceral adipose tissue (VAT). You may recognize VAT by its more common name: belly fat.
If adding flab to your abs isn’t enough to deter you, research shows eating a lot of refined grains is bad for your heart too.
But if you think buying “wheat bread” is the solution, you’re sadly mistaken.
Because most wheat bread you’ll find at the grocery store is actually made from refined grains, high-fructose corn syrup, and chemical fillers and preservatives like azodicarbonamide, an additive used as a flour bleaching agent and dough conditioner.
It’s also used to create foamed plastic products such as yoga mats, shoe soles, floor mats and window gaskets. Azodicarbonamide has been banned as a food additive in Europe and Australia—not in the USA though.
Am I saying you should you jump on the anti-grain bandwagon and shun wheat like it’s the red-headed stepchild of the culinary world? No. The vast majority of people will get no benefit from eating a gluten free diet. The gluten free crowd have made wheat the whipping boy for all imaginable ailments—but there’s just not a lot of peer reviewed, randomized, placebo-controlled studies (the gold standard of research) to back up their claims. A research paper that analyzed a whole bunch of studies made this conclusion:
“There is no evidence to suggest that following a gluten-free diet has any significant benefits in the general population. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that a gluten-free diet may adversely affect gut health in those without celiac disease or gluten sensitivity.”
This doesn’t mean you should make bread a primary food group, as current dietary guidelines suggest.
Here’s why: all grains, including wheat, get converted to sugar in your body. And when you don’t burn it off through exercise, it turns into fat.
So a lower-carb approach is a good bet for most people … but giving up carbs completely is not. There’s not enough evidence available to vouch for the long-term health effects.
How to Choose a Healthier Bread
Read the ingredients list. The first ingredient should always be a whole grain. If the label lists any grains that aren’t “whole,” find another option. The less ingredients, the better (ideally, bread should have whole grain flours, yeast, water, and salt … and not much else)
Choose breads that say “100 percent whole wheat”. If it says “wheat flour” on the label, this is plain white flour. All flour is “wheat flour”, so food companies, being the tricky bunch they are, use this to get you to think you’re buying healthy bread.
Look for a bread with all-natural ingredients. If you can’t pronounce something or don’t know what it is, don’t buy it.
And my personal preference: if you’re going to eat bread, buy it like your grandparents used to: from your local bakery. Ask what the ingredients are, and pick a whole grain or whole wheat loaf.
It’ll taste better, have better ingredients, and will be better for you.
Vegetable Oil
Vegetable oil is junk and causes inflammation. Choose olive oil and coconut oil instead.
For years so-called mainstream nutrition experts and health organizations have vilified saturated fat and told us that replacing butter and animal fats with vegetable oils is the secret to a healthy heart.
But the largest meta-analysis ever conducted on the health effects of saturated fat (which combined data from 21 studies and included nearly 350,000 adults) found no evidence that saturated fat increased risk of heart disease and stroke.
Furthermore, most vegetable oils you find on grocery store shelves (corn, cottonseed, soybean, etc.) have a high Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acid ratio. Unlike their heart healthy Omega-3 counterparts, Omega-6’s have been shown to promote inflammation and lead to insulin resistance in animal studies.
Chris Kresser does a nice job presenting the research about Omega-3 vs Omega-6 fatty acids if you’d like further reading on the topic.
The bottom line is this: cheap, processed vegetable oils have taken over our diet. Take a walk down the salad dressing aisle if you want proof. In the vast majority you’ll see “soybean oil” listed as the first ingredient. And salad dressings are just the tip of the vegetable oil-laden iceberg.
According to USDA’s Nutrient Content Report (the latest of which was published in 2004) Americans get almost 20 percent of their calories from soybean oil—20 percent! If I was a betting man, I’d wager not much has changed since ’04.
So what does this all mean? Are you doomed to a future of inflammation and obesity at the hands of these poisonous oils?
Maybe.
The silver lining is, you have options.
How to Choose a Healthier Oil
Use coconut oil or ghee (clarified butter) when cooking foods and olive oil as a dressing or dipping sauce (olive oil is not a good high heat cooking oil because it has a low smoke point).
Look for a salad dressing that lists olive oil as the first ingredient. From my experience, this can be quite difficult, but you can always make your own too.
So that’s a wrap. In next week’s post we’ll look at four more “healthy” foods that aren’t so healthy. Until then …
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