Foods To Avoid

With New Years resolution time at hand, one important thing to consider is how to improve your health in the coming year.  While many people ramp up for a new diet and fitness regime, there are also some less radical ways to dramatically improve your health.  Avoiding the worst culprits in the food and beverage industry will give you a head start on all of your fitness resolutions.  By just staying away from some common fat causing foods, you will be able to more effectively achieve your goals.  And, your heart will thank you too.

1.Soda Pop.  Of all the terrible ideas around, adding artificial flavor, caffeine, sugar and aspartame to drinking water sure takes the cake.  Drinking pop is one of the worst things you can do for your health and your waistline.  Full of empty calories, these drinks don’t fill you up, but they do certainly add fat.  Soda dehydrates you; forces your blood sugar to skyrocket from the sugar rush and then crash, and then rots your teeth to boot.  Even sugar and caffeine free varieties are harmful, as they use sugar replacement substitutes such as aspartame which carry their own risks.

2.Chips.  While chips can be just the thing to run to when you are away from home and hoping to stave off that mid-afternoon hunger, potato chips are one of the worst snacks you can reach for.  Almost all varieties of chips be they potato, vegetable, corn, or tortilla chips are excessively high in trans fat.  And while recently there seems to a be a whole new shelf in the grocery store dedicated to ‘healthy’ chip varieties, these snacks are still on the watch list.  Even though some claim to be made without trans-fats, the truth is that the high temperatures at which these chips are often made can create carcinogenic compounds. 

3.French Fries.  While it may seem that potatoes are getting an overly bad rap by adding French fries to a list already banning potato chips, the truth is that because the potato is so full of simple sugars, this particular tuber is high in the Glycemic Index .  This means that the potato sugar is converted quickly to glucose, a substance that then raises insulin levels thereby wreaking havoc on your body.  Your metabolism is affected by these rises and drops in blood sugar levels, and therefore for anyone trying to lose weight or even maintain good health, the potato is verboten.  Taking these insulin producing potatoes and frying them up in a bucket of trans-fats is a surefire way to ruin any diet.  Even when fried in vegetable oils like corn, canola, soybean or safflower oil, the high temperatures turn these oils rancid thereby producing free radical damage in the body.  Moreover, eating too many of these polyunsaturated oils can in itself lead to premature aging, clotting, inflammation, and weight gain. 

4.Alcohol.  After a hectic holiday schedule filled with late nights and parties a break from the drinking probably doesn’t seem so bad.  Limiting your consumption of alcohol more generally though may seem a bit overzealous to many a hefty drinkers.  Alcohol is however one of the worst offenders when it comes to keeping to one’s diet and avoiding the extra calories.  Alcohol is full of sugar and empty calories and on top of that when under the influence it is really easy to make some less than healthy food choices.  If you must indulge then limiting your intake to one glass of wine here and there with dinner is probably the best way to stave off the ill consequences of excessive consumption.  But, since the New Year is at hand, taking a month or two off it entirely could provide a great kick start to your health plans.

5.Meat.  Of course not all meats are created equal and as many of you have probably heard over and over again, choosing lean, skinless varieties of poultry, omega rich fish like salmon, and lower fat options for red meat like bison, are just some of the ways in which you can still indulge without clogging your arteries.  Nowadays, choosing meats also involves questions about the ethical treatment of animals and the environmental effects of factory farming.  In an ideal world, we would all eat less meat, choose organic, local farms when we do, and stick to lower fat options.  Since this is not always possible, try to stick to at least two out of three of these as a resolution for the New Year.  Try to avoid beef and pork entirely if you can.  Not only are these high fat meats potentially dangerous to your heart and arteries, large animals also take up a lot of space, a factor which contributes to clearing forest areas.  On top of this, these larger animals increase the level of carbon dioxide on our planet.  Opting for a vegetarian dinner at least three times a week will make a huge difference for your health and that of our planet.