Shockingly some healthy foods are not really
Shockingly some healthy foods you might want to avoid. You are all thinking that these are “healthy” foods are helping you lose weight or eat better? Here’s why they’re not as nutritious as you think.
Healthy Multigrain bread
Words like “multigrain” “wheat” and “7 grain” don’t mean all that much. Many breads labeled this way actually contained refined grains, which lack the fiber of whole grains and can make your blood sugar spike faster after eating, leading to cravings.
Healthy option- Be a smarter bread shopper! If the first flour listed on the label is refined (look for "bleached" or "unbleached enriched wheat flour"), it’s not really a whole grain product.
Bran muffins
Wholesome and humble, bran muffins seem like a breakfast food hero. But while bran itself is a healthy whole grain source of fiber, it becomes less—much, much less—nutritious when baked into a muffin with heaps of sugar, flour, and fat. “Depending on the size, a bran muffin can have more calories and sugar than a doughnut.
Healthy Choice-If you’re really craving a muffin, makes them yourself and look for recipes that use whole wheat flour and substitute applesauce for butter.
Spinach wraps and pasta
Don’t let the green color fool you. “The actual amount of spinach in these green tortillas and noodles is trivial compared with what you would get if you added your own spinach leaves to your wrap or pasta dish.
Option-Eat whole grain wraps or pasta, and then add actual spinach leaves to get the greens’ ample amounts of B vitamins, fiber, iron, and calcium.
Baked beans
Beans are healthy. Baked beans, on the other hand, “are a messy mix of pinto beans, sugar, syrup and molasses with an unnecessarily high calorie counts.
Option-Give regular pinto, kidney, and garbanzo beans more glamour by adding them to salads and pasta dishes.
Healthy Veggie patties
A diet staple for those trying to cut back on meat, veggie patties can be healthy. But many of the processed, frozen versions have more filler—used to create that burger-like texture—than actual vegetables.
Healthy Option-To ensure your burger is packed with real good-for-you greens and make sure vegetables are listed at the beginning of the ingredient list.
Flavored instant oatmeal
It’s a whole grain, a healthy grab-and-go breakfast choice, and easily topped with other healthful sides like berries, flax, and nuts. So what could possibly be bad about oatmeal? Well, flavored packets have more sugar and sodium than regular rolled or steel cut oats.
A better option- Dress up regular oatmeal with fresh fruit or a small amount of honey
Banana chips
No matter how you slice it, they’re just inferior to their original fruit source. A plain banana provides fiber, potassium, vitamin C, and fewer calories and fat
Option- One not-very-filling ounce of these chips, which are fried, has about 150 calories, while a medium banana only has 105.
Reduced-fat peanut butter
The fat from nuts is good for you! A recent Harvard study found that people who ate an ounce (a small handful) a day had a 20 percent lower risk of dying than people who didn’t. What’s more, when you compare labels of regular and reduced-fat peanut butter, you’ll see that calories are roughly equal.
Option-The reduced-fat versions add more sugar to make up for the lack of fat. So choose the regular kind, and stick to 1 to 2 tablespoons per serving.
Healthy Energy bars
Praise the marketing geniuses who figured out a way to sell foods that contain more sugar and calories than certain candy bars as healthy. Protein bars are all just processed chemicals.
Healthy Option- If you’re going to eat them, pick ones with fewer than 200 calories and 20 grams of sugar per serving, recommends. Also key: Read labels to choose bars with as few ingredients as possible. Some bars from brands like KIND and Larabar contain just nuts, dried fruit, and seeds.
Healthy Rice crackers
So light, so airy—rice crackers and cakes are the ultimate diet snack food cliché. But they lack fiber and can be high in sodium. What’s more, rice crackers are actually considered carb dense, meaning they have a high ratio of carb grams relative to their weight. (Carb dense foods can alter the balance of your gut flora and trigger inflammation.) A plain rice cake weighs only 9 grams but 80 percent of it is carbohydrate. In comparison, a small potato—which many people think is a “bad” carb—weighs 170 grams but only 23 percent is carbohydrate.
