Beware Of Healthy Fakes

There's so many healthy foods out right now, but beware some of these are healthy fakes.

Let's start with the foods that you pick up as a healthy alternative to a fatty snack like potato chips, rice cakes. Frankly, rice cakes taste healthy. There's very little to them, they're bland and one mini cake isn't nearly enough to curb an appetite. Rice cakes contain no nutrition, just sodium. If you select one of the tastier types, you'll find these have the bad fat, Trans fat.

Therefore, you pass on the rice cakes but decide a health food bar is more to your liking. Beware, there's a lot that these bars hide underneath their packaged promises.

First, if they taste good, they contain sugar, but that's mostly in granola bars. Sugar raises the insulin level, which stops the body from releasing growth hormones. In turn, the reduction growth hormones released causes the immune system to be depressed. Sugar also elevates your blood sugar level, makes the pancreas work frantically to produce insulin and then the level drops dramatically. These rapid changes in the blood sugar add additional stress on your body.

Okay, you don't want a healthy fake no matter how good it tastes so you check the ingredients for every type of sugar that you know and your bar passes with flying colors. However, the label shows the bar contains soy rice crisp or soy protein.

Soy is healthy, right? Wrong! According to a not for profit nutritional education organization, the Weston A Price Foundation in Washington DC, processed soy protein and soy oil that you find in many health food products shows a direct link to problems with the thyroid, digestive tract, reproductive organs including infertility, dementia, heart disease, ADD/ADHD and even a direct link to cancer.

Women that are at risk for breast cancer are warned to cut back on soy products because of the ever increasing evidence that diets high in soy products causes a greater amount of cells to multiply in the breast.

What can you eat as a healthy snack? Either select something that your mother made, by that I mean Mother Nature, or make it yourself so you know what the snack contains. Good wholesome fresh fruit, nuts, berries and seeds. Mix them together with some shredded wheat and you have homemade trail mix you can trust.

Drinks are deceptive also; there are many healthy fakes that pass themselves off as "good for you" and nutritious. Vitamin drinks offer a lot of healthy vitamins but also have an abundance of sugar.

These drinks contain as much as 8 teaspoons of sugar. Even though the vitamins enhance your immune system, the sugar in the drink suppresses it. Three teaspoons of sugar can suppress your immune system for up to four hours.

These have almost three times the amount of sugar. Twenty years ago, the average consumption of sugar was 26 pounds a year. Today the consumption has risen to an unprecedented 135 pounds per American, per year.

Is it any wonder that cancer and heart disease is on the rise, not to mention the increased number of Americans that even make their sweat pants scream under the strain of the extra body weight.

Bottled tea, even the unsweetened type, is also another healthy fake. Studies show that bottled tea contains no where near the antioxidants that brewed tea contains.

There are so many healthy fakes on the market everywhere you look. Why? Marketing. Manufacturers and fast food restaurants all know Americans want to eat healthy and now promote that with somewhat deceptive labeling. The easiest way to healthy eating is making the food, reading all labels and avoiding anything with sugars or corn syrup in the first 8 ingredients on the label. Next time you go shopping, read the labels and find some healthy fakes yourself.