Diet Tip: There are plenty of them. Maybe too much. After all, with all the weight loss information (and misinformation) in the world available on your smartphone, it can be hard to separate real evidence-based advice from pseudoscience, flashy promises, and fruitless fads.
So how can you navigate this challenging terrain? It can help to look for simple red flags. If the nutrition advice you read contains one of these seven myths, you’re probably missing some real weight-loss wisdom.
Need to detox
Any food or supplement that claims to help “detox” your body is a red flag. Our liver and kidneys are our professional detoxification organs, and nothing we eat can change that.
Eat as many superfoods as you can
There are many foods that are good for you, which means you can eat a lot – most fruits and vegetables fall into this category.
However, there is no such thing as a “superfood” that is simply a food with a good PR.
Fats Are Good (or Bad)
Whether you’re partial to fat, it’s GOOD for you or BAD for your brigade, the important question is the source of the fat.
If it comes from a land animal and is likely to be solid at room temperature, it is a saturated fat. Meanwhile, if it comes from fish or plants and is likely to be liquid at room temperature (coconut oil is a rare exception), it is an unsaturated fat.
All the evidence suggests that eating more unsaturated fat than saturated fat reduces “all-cause mortality” — essentially reducing the risk of early death.
Natural sugar is better
The vast majority of the sugar we consume is sucrose. It’s the white powder that we cook with and that’s in the tea, made up of glucose and fructose.
How about sugar from honey or maple syrup or agave nectar? They are often marketed as natural and therefore better for you or, more interestingly, as a “sugar-free” alternative (Great British Bake Off and your “sugar free week” I’m looking at you).
This is simply not true. They taste different than sugar because one is bee vomit, one is tree sap, and the other is concentrated cactus juice, so naturally each of the different recipes has its own flavor. But they are all sweet because of glucose and fructose.
More so
High pH (alkaline) water will revitalize your body
With a pH of 7.4, our blood is slightly alkaline (less than 7 is acidic, more than 7 is alkaline). Therefore, some people believe that we should eat alkaline foods, including drinking water with a high pH.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid! Everything we eat or drink passes through the stomach, which at 1.5 pH is the most acidic part of the body. It is then neutralized to pH 7 when it enters the small intestine.
Nothing we eat will change the pH of our blood. Don’t waste your money on alkaline water and diets.
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Don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce
This is part of the push to eat “natural” or “clean” foods. But whether natural or highly processed, all foods are full of chemicals, you just don’t happen to know their scientific name.
For example, should you be afraid of “phenylthiourea” because you can’t pronounce it? It is simply the chemical responsible for the bitter taste characteristic of cabbage and mustard plants. That kind of advice is plain scary.
Do not eat foods that contain more than five ingredients
Simple foods may indeed be very tasty, but they are not necessarily healthier for you. For example, if I used Chinese five spice powder in a recipe, it would probably count as one of the five ingredients. However, what if I added the typical components of five-spice powder to the dish separately, namely star anise, fennel seeds, Sichuan peppercorns, cloves, and cinnamon?
Does this mean my recipe suddenly goes bad because it has more than five ingredients?
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