Eating Healthy: What Ingredients in Food Labels to Avoid

It's important to eat as healthy as we can, while we still can.  Food is where your nutrition comes from, and your main energy source.  Making the wrong food choices has a costly consequence.  Below are some bad ingredients found in the common foods we Americans love.  I have also added a description of what it is, and what it does.

Refined Grain - Don't be outwitted by this one.  Refined grain is found in many things that we buy at the store including white rice, sugar-filled cereals, white pasta, and other foods that have been made with flour.  Many studies have shown that people who eat less of the refined grains have a lower risk of getting heart disease.  Refined grains are known to cause high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

Aspartame - This is supposedly one of the most dangerous ingredients found in almost all food and chewing gums.  Aspartame is known to cause many diseases including heart attacks, blurred vision, and nausea.  Although it is not a known fact that artificial sweeteners and cancers are related, many believe that Aspartame can be a factor of cancer.  Aspartame is an artificial sweetener that is 180 times sweeter than sugar, and we should try and avoid it as much as we can.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup - Many studies have shown that High-Fructose corn syrup has a colossal impact; causing us to overeat.  Today, we consume over 60 pounds of it every year per person.  Corn syrup is found in many frozen products and packaged foods.  It also messes up our metabolism which can cause heart disease and diabetes. 

Bleached Flour - This ingredient doesn't actually sound to bad with the word 'flour' in it, but in reality, bleached flour is milled and bleached and it looses almost all of its natural and whole-grain substance.  When eating bleached flour, you are putting yourself in harms way of getting diabetes.  Not only causing health problems, bleached flour also contains chlorine in it.  When we bake a cake, we are usually using bleached flour because it can hold a higher amount of sugar, and lower for flour.

Avoiding all of these ingredients will help you maintain a healthy life style and know what to avoid when picking out those quick and cheap packaged products.

Stay healthy!

xo,
Daphne










Sites used in this blog post:

Reader's Digest: http://www.rd.com/health/4-most-harmful-ingredients-in-packaged-foods/2/
Joy Bauer's Food Cures: http://www.joybauer.com/food-articles/refined-grains.aspx
Kashi Ingredient Decoder: http://www.kashi.com/real_food/ingredients