Unhealthy foods are the main reason people are fatter and sicker than ever before. Surprisingly, many people consider some of these foods to be healthy.

On the one hand, this is due to the clever marketing strategy of many in the food industry who want to sell us their products as superfoods and declare them “healthy”. Unfortunately, there are many “healthy” foods that are actually anything but beneficial for our health and our success in losing weight.

In this article, we would like to introduce you to 7 “ healthy foods ” which in reality are disguised low-quality junk food .

Ready-made salad dressings

Vegetables are incredible healthy. The problem with this is that it is often not very tasty on its own. Because of this, many people use ready-made salad dressings to add flavor to their salads and turn those bland meals into delicious treats.

But many salad dressings are actually full of unhealthy ingredients like sugar, vegetable oils and trans fats, along with lots of artificial additives . While vegetables are good for you, any health benefits you get from the salad will be nullified if you eat the vegetables with a dressing that is high in harmful ingredients.

Make sure you Check the ingredients list before using a salad dressing … or make one yourself using fresh, healthy ingredients.

Fruit juices (which are literally just made of sugar)

Many people believe that fruit juices are healthy. After all, they have to be … because they’re made of fruit, right?

But a lot of the fruit juices you can find in the grocery store aren’t actually fruit juices. Sometimes it doesn’t even contain any real fruit, just chemicals that taste like fruit. What you drink is basically just fruit-flavored sugar water.

Besides that, even if you drink high quality juice with 100% fruit content, it’s still a bad idea. Fruit juice is like fruit except that all the good things (like fiber) have been removed … what’s mostly left of the original fruit is the sugar.

In case you didn’t know, fruit juice actually contains a similar amount of sugar as drinks sweetened with sugar.

margarine

butter was demonized in the past because of its high content of saturated fatty acids. Many health professionals started promoting margarine instead. At the time, margarine was high in trans fats . Nowadays it has fewer trans fats than it used to be, but it’s still full of refined vegetable oils.

Margarine is not a food … It’s a collection of chemicals and refined oils that are designed to look and taste like a “ natural ”food.

Not surprisingly, the Framingham Heart Study showed that people who replaced butter with margarine were at higher risk of dying from heart disease.
If you want to improve your health, eat real butter ( preferably grazing cow butter ) but avoid processed margarine and other artificial foods like the plague.

Margarine, which is full of trans fats, recommended instead of natural butter, was perhaps the worst nutritional advice in human history.

Sports drinks

When you created sports drinks, you thought of athletes. These beverages contain electrolytes (salts) and sugar, which in many cases can be beneficial for athletes.

However … most average people don’t need additional salts and they certainly don’t need liquid sugar.

While they are often considered ” less bad ” than sugary soft drinks, in reality there is no significant difference other than that the sugar content is sometimes slightly lower.

It is It is important to drink enough fluids, especially when exercising, but for most people it is probably better to stick to still water .

agave syrup

Given the known harmful effects of sugar, people have been looking for alternatives.

One of the more popular “natural” sweeteners is agave nectar, also known as agave syrup or agave syrup . You can find this sweetener in all kinds of “healthy foods”, often with appealing promises on the packaging.

The problem with agaves is that they are no better than sugar. In fact, they are much, much worse …

One of the main problems with sugar is that it contains extreme amounts of fructose, which, if consumed in excess, can cause serious metabolic disorders.

While sugar contains around 50% fructose and high-fructose corn syrup (I soglucose ) around 55%, agave contains even more … up to 70-90%. This is why agaves are even worse than regular sugar, gram for gram.

You see, “natural” is not always synonymous with “healthy” … and whether agave should be considered natural at all is questionable.

vegetable oils

The use of seed and vegetable oils is often recommended. These include sunflower oil, soybean oil, canola oil, grapeseed oil, and many others. This is based on the fact that these oils have been shown to lower blood cholesterol levels, at least in the short term.

But … it’s important to remember that blood cholesterol levels are a risk factor, NOT a disease in itself.

While vegetable oils can improve a risk factor, there is no guarantee that they can help prevent actual hard endpoints like heart attacks or death, which is what really matters.

So eat healthy, natural fats like butter, coconut oil, olive oil, or MCT oil, but avoid processed vegetable oils like your life depends on them (because it does) .

Ready-made breakfast cereal

The way some breakfast cereals are marketed is a shame.
Many of these, including those marketed with children in mind, have all kinds of health claims on the packaging. This includes misleading phrases like “whole grains” or “low fat”.

But … if you actually look at the ingredients list, you will see that it contains almost all processed grains, sugar and artificial additives

The truth is, if the packaging of a food says the product is healthy, it probably isn’t.

The really healthy foods are those that don’t need any health claims … wholesome foods that only consist of one ingredient, as they are the ingredient themselves.

Healthy eating does not need a list of ingredients at all, because a fresh and natural food itself is the only ingredient.