Is your ‘healthy diet’ making you unhealthy?

You choose the bread with the chia seeds, you eat a high fibre cereal in the morning. You love your yogurt and you have plenty of juice.

All of this sounds great, but do you actually know what you're putting in your body?

If you go through your pantry and fridge and read the ingredients list for everything that is pre-packaged then I believe you may only recognise 50-60% of the ingredients that are listed.

Take a high protein breakfast cereal. This particular cereal has 5 different types of sugars including sugar, invert sugar, humectant, glucose solids, golden syrup.

After a quick google the about what the heck humectant is, it seems to be an emulsifier derived from sugar which is used in many cosmetics (yummm!…..or maybe not so much).

And this particular breakfast cereal has 22g of sugar per 100g…this works out to 7 teaspoons of sugar per 100g f the breakfast cereal. (CLICK HERE for more info about sugar and how to work out the teaspoons/100g). The interesting thing about this product is that while it states that it is a protein breakfast cereal the amount of protein per 100g is 14g compared to 22g of sugar.

Now lets take the yogurt which make sure you have. You get the no added sugar variety and the low fat, so it must be healthy. But if you take a quick look at the ingredients list the 5 of the first 7 ingredients are unrecognisable as far as ‘food’ goes. The 3rd ingredients is polydextrose- upon a quick google it appears to be a low carbohydrate derivative of glucose, a source of fibre and commonly used as a sugar substitute. The issue with polydextrose is that it can’t be broken down by the intestines, contributing to gas, bloating and digestive upsets.

So this is breakfast, lots of unrecognisable ‘foods’ which provide little to no nutritional benefit.

The amount of sugar alone found in the breakfast cereal is enough to impact blood sugar levels throughout the rest of the day, as well as promoting inflammation within the body. Combine this breakfast with a bought lunch of sausage roll and a flavoured mineral water (or a coke) and dinner is a ready made supermarket meal or a homemade stir fry made with pre-made stir fry sauce, noodles and veggies, the amount of additives, sugar (hidden in the mineral water and stirfy sauce) and trans fats really does add up.

So as a general rule I tell my clients that if you’re eating packaged foods (whether it be muesli bars, yogurt, pasta, breads etc) keep the ingredients list to 5 ingredients or less. By implementing this general rule you’re less likely to be consuming any of these sugar substitutes, cosmetic ingredients, artificial colours and flavours. My big issue with a lot of these additives are that many of them haven’t been used long term. The polydextrose as discussed above as only been widely used for the last 15 years. Any possible health consequences that may be due to these foods are probably not even seen yet. Eating fresh, whole foods, takes the burden off your body and your hip pocket (because honestly it costs more to eat packaged food then fresh fruit and veg).