We are misguided by fake advertisements very often that some foods are really good for health, but actually they are opposite. Today I am going to share some of those common foods which you should stop consuming if you really want to stay healthy.
- Juice in general has a ton of sugar
Juice also has wayyy less antioxidants and other beneficial compounds than whole fruit because the process of extracting the juice (leaving behind a lot of good stuff in the pulp) and pasteurizing it degrades many of them.
I personally never drink juice for this reason, you pretty much might as well drink soda the sugar is pretty much the same, and no, there isn't a big difference between the sugar in fruit juice and the sugar and soda in terms of diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc.
Granola.
High calorie on purpose. Great when you're on a hike, bad as a regular snack at the desk.Veggie straws
This! They are basically potato chips with a dusting of powdered veggies. I was duped by this too until I read the ingredient list. The very last ingredient will be something like "dried vegetable powder".Breakfast cereal
"Part of a balanced breakfast"
LOL...ain't NOBODY actually eats the recommended serving size.The key part in that popular phrase is "part of," because carbs and milk are "part of" a balanced diet.
- Craisins or dried cranberries
They're loaded with sugar because cranberries are naturally very tart. They usually say “evaporated cane juice” on those, which is a fancy way to say sugar.
People think saturated fat and cholesterol are bad because of two key players: Ancel Keys in the 50's and sugar companies in the 60's.
Ancel Keys was a researcher (though he dirties that title) who saw that some nations saw reduced rates of heart disease during the rationing of WWII. He hypothesized that this was because they ate less saturated fat and cholesterol during that time. Also, arterial plaque looks like saturated fat, and measuring your cholesterol levels was one of the few biological markers easy to measure then.
He compiled a list of nations which seemed to show that less saturated fat = less heart disease.
Other people pointed out that he didn't include any nations which didn't fall in line with his hypothesis.
So he made a bigger study, with more nations in the study, throwing out any more which didn't support his hypothesis.
They pointed out, again, that he didn't have any real evidence. So he shouted PEOPLE ARE DYING DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO DIE WE CAN'T WAIT FOR THE EVIDENCE then helped his senator BFF write the national dietary guidelines.
So the federal government started saying that saturated fat and cholesterol intake = heart disease.
Then in the 60's, because people wanted more real research, the sugar companies paid off a bunch of scientists to say that fat = bad, which just cemented the saturated fat = evil thing even further.
If you look at studies not sponsored by sugar companies, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol do not contribute to heart disease.
In fact, they can help protect against it.
You see, your body needs saturated fat and cholesterol anyway. Think of saturated fat as the bricks for the walls of your cells, and cholesterol as the mortar holding them together.
If you're eating low quality fats, your bricks will be weaker, and you'll need to use more mortar to hold the walls together. Which increases the cholesterol numbers, though those actually aren't that important. We'll get to that in a little bit.
Saturated fat has all of its molecular connections filled, hence "saturated" fat. Polyunsaturated fat has lots of unfilled connections, which are vulnerable to damage from heat, oxygen, and sugar. Damaged fats = bad bricks. Vegetable oil will be damaged before they make it to the shelves, and will be in even worse shape.
Cholesterol is used by your body to create and repair cells, as mentioned in the mortar metaphor. But your cholesterol numbers are measures of the lipoproteins which carry cholesterol around.
The same bit of your body that makes the cholesterol (necessary for life!) also makes the lipoproteins.
If you consume plenty of cholesterol, great, your body can focus on producing and reclaiming the lipoproteins.
But if your body has to produce almost all of the cholesterol it needs, then it can't focus on reclaiming the lipoproteins. So what does it do?
It uses macrophages in your blood stream to chomp on and reclaim the cholesterol carrying lipoproteins. They can't do that easily while floating around, so they stick the lipoprotein to the blood vessel walls.
That's arterial plaque.
HDL is referred to good cholesterol; that's what takes cholesterol to the cells to be used. LDL is referred to as bad cholesterol, that's the one your body has to use macrophages to reclaim if it's too body producing cholesterol.
Total numbers are worthless; the bar for "high" cholesterol has been lowered multiple times, and currently half of people who die from heart disease have "low" cholesterol. Your cholesterol count could be high because your body is using a lot of cholesterol, or high because it's not using much cholesterol and so it's just circling around the bloodstream.
HDL to LDL ratio is a much better statistic to look at. If you have very little HDL and a lot of LDL then your LDL is probably not getting reclaimed properly so macrophages are having to do the job. A higher amount of HDL compared to LDL is likely to show that your cholesterol cycle is working properly, and the LDL is being reclaimed in an organ instead of in your arteries.
It's not an open question. We know that saturated fat isn't bad for you, and dietary cholesterol isn't bad for you. There has been five decades of research, most of it published only quietly (the file drawer problem, aka publication bias, is a serious problem), backing that up.
But the federal government can't just come down from a hard-line "saturated fats are bad guys" stance, and neither can entities like the AHA, because then that'd mean they would have to apologize for leading the American public astray for all of those decades.
Plus there's money in it. Low-fat foods require more sugar to be palatable, and agricultural lobbyists love anything that increases sugar consumption, because corn.
Which, by the way, is why we use corn ethanol over more efficient crops. Corn is one of the least efficient sugary crops for producing ethanol, but lol lobbyists.