Foods to Avoid
Your body, like a bank account, requires regular deposits of healthy, nutritious, disease-fighting food. Your body can tolerate a few withdrawals here and there. A little junk food once in a while never killed anyone. But too many withdrawals will lead to health problems.
However, I am a firm believer that food is to be enjoyed. We just have to pick and choose which foods are worth it for our health and which are not. Nothing is really off limits. But to avoid a big hit to your health bank account, limit or avoid the following five foods.
Fast food and large restaurant
The main problem with restaurant meals these days is disgusting portion sizes. Consider the evolution of pizza. From a reasonably healthy, vegetable-rich, thin-crust pie of decades past, we’ve come to Pizza Hut Double Deep Pizza. Eat a couple of slices and you’ll be blowing your fat and calorie budget.
Be sure to enjoy your double deep pizza, because you’ll have to pay for it out of more than your wallet. At 1,200 calories, it will take you two hours of straight jogging to burn them off. And there’s nothing you can do to burn off a day and a half’s worth of saturated fat and nearly two days’ worth of sodium from that meal.
The other problem with restaurant dining is that most of us are notoriously bad at estimating how many calories are in the food we eat. Naturally, we underestimate. Add in the fact that most of us are notoriously bad at not eating everything in front of us. It’s a recipe for dietary disaster.
Unless you have iron discipline or train like an iron man triathlete, eating in restaurants more than once or twice a week is simply incompatible with good health and a healthy body weight.
fluffy coffee drinks
I call it the Starbucks effect. Our morning coffee has gone from a zero-calorie pick-me-up to a fat, calorie extravaganza with whipped cream and a drizzle of chocolate. Most people hold up the big (venti) Double Chocolate Chip Frappuccino Blended Crème as the example of coffee gone crazy. It is true. This drink will set you back 670 calories and 22 grams of fat, or nearly a third of your daily intake.
But how many people drink this as their morning coffee drink? Even if you don’t splurge on the Double Chocolate Chip Frappuccino, you’re probably doing more harm than you realize. Even a medium Caffè Vanilla Frappuccino Light Blended Beverage has 170 calories. Almost all of them are sugar. It is curious that the word “light” appears in the name of this drink.
You may remember from last week’s newsletter that drinking our calories creates a huge disconnect between the brain and the body. Our bodies do not register liquid calories very effectively. This means we don’t eat less to make up for those calories. Just like with soft drinks, if you’re taking in extra calories in a foamy coffee drink, your body doesn’t even know it!
I’d be willing to bet that at least part of the blame for our national obesity epidemic can be attributed to our habit of indulging in high-calorie coffee “drinks.”
“Excellent” Donuts, Muffins, and Bagels
Just like restaurant food and coffee drinks, donuts, muffins, and bagels pack a punch. Portions have become huge. These items provide far more calories and fat than most people realize.
The typical bagel today is six ounces. Before portion sizes exploded, bagels weighed two ounces. And that’s before the butter or cream cheese.
The muffins are even worse. In addition to increasing from three to six and a half ounces in recent years, they often contain trans fat. Trans fat really is as bad as it’s been made out to be. For every 2% increase in energy intake from trans fats, there is a 23% increase in cardiovascular risk.
If you love a muffin, consider it a dessert. If you enjoy a morning bagel, opt for whole grains. Make a mental note of how many calories you’re actually eating, too. Simply recognizing how much you’re actually consuming can go a long way toward making better choices throughout the rest of the day. And skip the coffee drink. Why double the damage?
White Pasta Sauce Dishes (Think Fettuccine Alfredo)
Yes, the much-maligned fettuccine Alfredo and similar creamy pasta dishes are back on the list. As with the three worst foods listed above, the sheer amount of calories and fat contained in these foods make them dietary disaster zones.
A typical restaurant serving of fettuccine Alfredo serves up around 1,200 calories and 75 grams of fat. Sixty-three percent of those fat grams are saturated fat.
The other problem with fettuccine Alfredo and similar pasta dishes is the company they keep. Add a couple of breadsticks. Add a glass of wine or a mixed drink. Enjoy the dessert. At this point, you will need to fast for the entire next day to balance the calories you ate at that meal.
“Diet” anything
The reason diet foods come under my scrutiny has nothing to do with what’s in them. It’s about what they don’t have. Diet foods are not the threat of calories and fat that most processed foods are. Aside from sodium, most diet foods aren’t big offenders. But they’re not much of anything else either.
Diet foods are missing more than just calories and fat. They just can’t give your body what it needs to function optimally. This is where we return to a central message that everyone who cares about health should hear.
Whole, unprocessed plant foods should be the foundation of our diet. If we want to avoid cancer, heart disease, obesity, chronic pain, and more, plant foods must cover three-quarters of our plate. This includes meals and snacks.
Diet foods are fine in a pinch, but they are not the source of disease-fighting nutrients that whole plant foods are. They do not contain the thousands of nutrients that only vegetables, fruits, whole grains and legumes (beans) can offer.
Not surprisingly, people who eat mainly plants do not need diet foods. They are, on average, much leaner than their non-plant-eating counterparts. You just can’t go overboard with the calories and fat when most of what goes into your mouth comes directly from a tree, vine, stem, bush, or from the ground!