Death by Pre-Packaged Foods

September 16th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under
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The average American eats 3850 calories a day.  No wonder many of us are tipping the scales in the elephantine direction.

Pre-packaged foods only add to the misery.  They contain loads of empty calories.  Those empty calories impact our health and our waistline, and they’re a direct hit on our wallets, too.

 

The health impacts are numerous-

  1. High salt - increases your blood pressure and causes you to retain water.
  2. Sugar -  other names for sugar in ingredients - any word ending in -ose or syrup.  Examples include fructose, glucose, corn syrup and rice syrup.  When low fat foods became popular, the fat was substituted with walloping amounts of sugar.  This sugar messes up your blood sugar levels and can lead to diabetes and weight gain - not weight loss, as was originally predicted.
  3. Partially hydrogenated oils - banned in Canada and in many cities across the United States.  Clog those arteries and pay more to do it.
  4. Artificial flavors and colors - many are known carcinogens.
  5. Preservatives such as the sodium nitrite in bacon or sausages = carcinogen. Or Dried fruits are often sprayed with sulfer dioxide, another known cancer causing chemical.

 

What the processed food industry doesn’t want you to know-

  • Many additives are known carcinogens.
  • Many additives that are not known carcinogens just haven’t been tested.
  • Foods that have been frozen for 6 months lose 50% of their nutritional value.
  • Foods that should have fat in them but don’t, like cookies and cakes, often have insanely high levels of sugar to compensate for the lack of flavor.
  • Many of the vitamins in food are removed during processing, and are then put back in as powders.
  • Canned and frozen foods have too much salt.

 

What you can do-

Read and compare the ingredients on the package.  Not all raisin bran, for example, is the same.

Buy products with short ingredients lists.  Generally, the higher the number of ingredients, the worse the product is for you.

Shop the grocery store perimeter, and stay away from the middle aisles.  The middle aisles have the really bad processed foods.

Note that words like natural and healthy can be put on anything.  These terms aren’t regulated, and are used freely to misrepresent many products.

Check out ingredients you don’t recognize.  There are websites that can help you determine the safety of these compounds.  Here’s a link I use from The Center For Science in the Public Interest:  Food Additives.

Eat only whole wheat bread and brown rice. Avoid the “whites.”

Take a look at the picture on the package, and then the actual product.  The picture is usually doctored up to make it look much better than the real thing.

If you don’t see specific foods that you know are good for you, ask your grocers if they’ll stock them. What we purchase dictates what will be available.

 

Save your cash and stick to real unprocessed foods.  It’s the frugal healthy thing to do.

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