Cookies for Breakfast
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 When describing food, the word healthy is just so BLAH. Overused, meaningless, attention grabbing. Kinda like the word literally. Which apparently is now a contranym, by the way. Truthfully, what is healthy for one person may not be healthy for another, it depends on what your goals are and what your body's needs are as well.
The foods that I suggest for my clients are of course what I consider to be healthy: vegetables, fruit, unsweetened dairy products, intact grains, nuts, beans, proteins, and healthy fats. These foods are filling, and generally low in calories, which makes them harder to overeat, but not impossible. Creating a calorie deficit through portion control and activity is still essential if weight loss is your goal.
Tons of products out there are labeled "healthy" or "natural," yet many are extremely high in calories, making them easy to overeat. One time I saw at the store an "egg white quiche," and after reading the label I found out that the first ingredient was butter! Or "natural" granola that is basically a box of crushed up oatmeal cookies.
So-called "health food" stores can sometimes be the worst offenders with carrying these types of food frauds. There are whole aisles of raw ingredient cookies and gluten-free snack cakes. Are these products intentionally deceptive? Yes and no. If you're a person at a healthy weight but happen to have celiac disease (gluten allergy), a gluten-free cake might be something that's okay to eat. But for most of us, it's just a cake, a food full of sugar that makes us hungrier than we would have been without it.
This is a nutrition comparison I did between "natural" granola breakfast cereal and oatmeal cookies:
In 51 grams of the natural granola there are 5 grams of fat, 38 grams of carbohydrate, and 5 grams of protein. In 51 grams of the cookies there are 7 grams of fat, 32 grams of carbohydrate, and 3 grams of protein. The first three ingredients in both foods are oats, processed flour, and sugar. Oil is ingredient number five. I think you get my point. Granola is just a way that food companies have figured out to make us not feel guilty about eating cookies for breakfast.
Wait, there's more! Some foods companies have decided that if they put "healthy" in the name of the food that people will buy more of it.
Healthy Mornings! Now with processed grains, sugar, sugar coated nuts, corn syrup, natural and artificial flavoring, and BHT!
Oh, and you know that "natural flavors" ingredient? Turns out, there's a lot of natural stuff you probably still don't want to eat. Castoreum is a vanilla flavoring that is taken from the castor sacs of beavers, right next to the anal glands, and is listed on food labels as "natural flavors." Yum. Bonus trivia: beaver butts actually do smell like vanilla.
And then there's the pure white granulated sugar. Apparently nothing is off limits.
Only 15 calories per teaspoon!? Well they're technically correct, and I guess that's the best kind of correct, but that won't keep me from judging them for making a health claim on a bag of f%#king sugar. How dumb do they think we are?
The healthiest foods are the ones in the produce section. And they don't have packaging to make idiotic health claims.
Reader Comments (1)
Is this beaver knowledge first-hand? That seems like an odd bit of trivia to know :)
I'm blown away by how often the packages try to get you to buy them for some other health reason... some form of food industry misdirection. Things like "no sugar added" (oh? you didn't ADD sugar, it must be good for me! nothing bad in here at all!) or "sugar/fat free" (you know they added something else to deliver a similar tasting product to the regular version). I'm pretty sure I've seen a diet drink that touted it was gluten free. Healthy!
Just stay to the outside of the store. Stay out of the aisles... You thought you brought your willpower in there, but you turn around and it's gone... kidnapped by Captain Crunch. Turn back around... and somehow there's a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (CTC - yes, it's so good it deserves an acronym) in your basket.