Real Nutrition Facts
by Sky Smith
One of the best ways to stay healthy and lose weight is to keep track of which foods go into your body. This usually means avoiding fast food joints or restaurants, which nobody particularly likes to do. Nevertheless, you have to ask yourself, ‘How badly do I want to be healthy?’ Besides, at the end of the day, when you’ve been a good boy or girl, you can have the occasional McDonald’s or Outback Steakhouse, especially if you know what on the menu is safe or good enough for you to eat.
A common trend of people who are overweight is to eat whatever is desired without stopping to consider the nutritional value of the food. In fact, until I was thirteen, I never once thought to check how much saturated fat were in the eggs and cheeses I was shoveling into my mouth or how many sugars were in the sodas I drank. Consequently, I ended up being a ‘butterball,’ as my friend, Alex, would so lovingly put it.
Thus, there came a time when I had to watch what food I ate. It wasn’t a matter of buying a diet book or following some on-line regime. Rather, I adhered to a few simple rules of reading the nutrition facts, learning which foods to avoid and which to seek. Then by the time I was sixteen, I lost my title of ‘butterball’ in exchange for something meatier.
The first step to healthier eating is to avoid trans fats. As of January 1, 2006, all packaged food items were required to list trans fatty acids in their Nutritional Facts panel. These mutated fats, which usually result from frying foods in vegetable oils, increase bad cholesterol levels and are linked with the risks of Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. They’re commonly found in French fries, doughnuts, cakes, and most foods cooked with shortening, but nowadays a lot of restaurants and food brands have found alternative methods to eliminate the presence of these unwanted fats. For instance, McDonald’s French fries actually contain 0 trans fats now as do Gorton’s fish fillets which once contained much more. If you’re unsure of whether or not the food you’re eating contains trans fats, either check the label or look it up on-line. Either way, it’s important to know.
The next step to healthier eating is to reduce foods high in sugar, especially any food that lists “high fructose corn syrup” as one of its leading (first) ingredients. A common mistake of people is to buy orange juice and think that because it has 100% of vitamin C and it’s made from a fruit that it’s good for you. In reality, most juices like Tropicana’s original orange juice get their flavors from manufactured fragrances than from fruits (http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/05/19/fresh-from-the-press/#more-57383), and with 22 grams of sugar per cup, you’re almost better off having a cookie, water, and a vitamin C pill than a serving of OJ.
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