When a health conscious girl picks up an item in the grocery store, she usually looks at the number of calories on the food label. Her eyes may wander down to the ingredients portion of the label, but since she has no idea what brominated vegetable oil is, she quickly overlooks it.
Taking control of your health is more than just cutting down on calories. These days, when so many names of ingredients are either impossible to pronounce or incredibly deceptive, it is difficult to know what you’re really eating. Listed below are some commonly overlooked ingredients that you might want to consider avoiding.
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)
This has received a lot of attention recently among health savvy individuals, and it can be found in almost all of the processed foods we eat. MSG is a salt compound that is generally added to enhance the flavors of foods. It is typically found in many snacks as well as frozen dinners, salad dressings and meats.
“MSG makes food taste good without it having to be fresh,” said Josephine Lee, nutritionist at Nutrition Clinic in St. Louis, Mo. “Scientifically speaking, it irritates your tongue so it becomes more sensitive to taste. It excites your neurons, but can also over stimulate your brain, causing the cells to die.”
Lee recommends staying clear of ingredients with long, complex names and filling your diet instead with naturally produced foods.
Olestra
You would think that the whole point of a fat free or low calorie snack would be to better your health, not to potentially make it worse. Nevertheless, many of the foods people run to during a diet can still contain potentially harmful chemicals.
Olestra (or Olean), for example, is a food additive that acts as a substitute for fat. Because it doesn’t add fat, calories or cholesterol to products, it is typically used in “light” versions of snack foods, such as potato chips.
There is still debate regarding the actual harm Olestra can cause. The founders of the additive, the Procter & Gamble, discovered in a study that it absorbs the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K when they are present in the stomach with Olestra. This means that eating a vitamin rich food with a product that contains Olestra might prevent your body from receiving the benefits of those important vitamins.
Simple Sugars (or anything with an –ose attached to it)
Sugar is one of the most common things people try to avoid when eating healthy, but it turns out that some sugars are worse for you than others. Sucrose, dextrose and fructose are all simple forms of carbohydrates that are found in juices, syrups and many baked goods. These contain more of the sweet taste we enjoy, but are lower in nutrients.
Lee said that she would rather a person consume raw sugar in moderation than intake large amounts of simple sugar in their diet.
“Our diet 100 years ago was maybe five percent fructose, but today, more than 15 percent of calories can be due to fructose,” Lee said. “It essentially poisons our liver and can lead to diabetes, kidney stones and gout, which is a disease that causes acute pain in the joints.
Enriched Flour
Anyone who looks at a food label with this ingredient would probably say to themselves, “Enriched flour? Well that’s got to be good for me right?” While enriched flour doesn’t harm your body more than regular flour, it does not help it much either.
Flour is produced when grains, seeds or roots are ground using a mill; usually a whitening agent is then added to create the fine, white powder that we are accustomed to. During this process, however, all of the nutrients in the grains are completely stripped from the product. This causes your body to uptake the flour like it’s a simple carb rather than a fiber-filled grain.
According to You: On a Diet, the highly acclaimed book by doctors Mehmet Oz and Michael Roizen, “enriched” means that only a small portion of the original nutrients have been re-added to the finished product. They recommend buying items with whole grain flour to receive all of the benefits.
Although it may be overwhelming to think about all of the foods that can contain harmful substances, Karina Diaz, UI PhD student in nutritional sciences, said that people should not begin to obsess over every little ingredient in their food.
“Anything can be harmful, it just depends on the amount you eat,” Diaz said. “As long as you make sure to eat a lot of fresh foods and moderate your sodium, fat and processed foods, then you shouldn’t worry too much.”
Sources:
Josephine Lee, nutritionist at Nutrition Clinic in St. Louis, Mo.
Center for Science in the Public Interest, http://www.cspinet.org/
You: On a Diet by Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen
Karina Diaz, PhD student in nutritional sciences at the University of Illinois