Diets are never particularly fun because they force you to substitute the foods you like for the ones you don’t. Rather than being able to dine on pizza and soda every night, you have to find a healthy alternative to do the job. However, it seems that our perceptions of what are and aren’t good for you might have been wrong all this time. It turns out that some of the foods praised by diets for being healthy are actually really bad for your body.
Granola
Fancy starting the day with a bowl of granola. It doesn’t look particularly appealing with all those oats and dried fruit, so it must be healthy, right? Well, perhaps not. Before you start buying boxes of the stuff from the grocery store, you might want to look at what’s in it. It turns out that granola is packed with tons of sugar to make it more appealing to those forcing themselves to eat it. You might want to give this one a miss first thing in the morning.
Fat-free yogurt
Granola isn’t the only thing that’s filled with sugar to give it a better taste. You should always be wary of anything that advertises itself as low in fat because chances are it’s changed one bad substance for another. Sure, eating this yogurt might not be putting any fat in your body, but the amount of sugar you’re now consuming is just as bad. Well, the makers have to do something to make the yogurt taste good. Otherwise, no-one’s going to buy their product.
Fruit juice
Everywhere you look, people are telling you it’s essential to get your daily fix of fruit and vegetables. Therefore, anything that has these ingredients in them should be good for a diet, right? Not quite. Fruit juice might sound like an ideal drink when you’re trying to be healthy, but there are some things these products aren’t telling you. Unless you’ve squeezed the fruit yourself, it’s likely the juice contains added chemicals that won’t do your body good. Given a glass of this is generally high in calories, you’re not doing yourself any favors.
Rice cakes
They’re so bland and tasteless that they must be good for you. That’s the thinking behind the use of rice cakes as diet food, but they’re not that great for you nutritionally. There’s hardly anything in them, so the pain of eating them isn’t worth it. Plus, the flavored varieties are full of salt and sugar, and they still don’t taste that great.
Protein bars
So it turns out this might not be the snack to eat when you’ve pushed yourself hard at the gym. While some protein bars can actually be good for you, a lot of them are filled with artificial ingredients that don’t care about improving your body. Most of the time, they’re calorific and loaded with sugar, essentially making them an expensive candy bar.
Always be wary of what you eat when on a diet. Just because something looks or sounds healthy doesn’t mean that it is.
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