10 “Healthy” Foods That Are Often Worse Than You Think
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“This is healthy, it’s a…” is an easy mistake to make if one doesn’t read the labels. Here are 10 tricksters to watch out for in particular!
Don’t be fooled by healthy aesthetics on the packaging…
Notwithstanding appearances and in many cases reputations, these all merit extra attention:
- Yogurt: sweetened yogurts, especially “fruit at the bottom / in the corner” types, often have 15–30g of sugar per serving. Plain Greek yogurt is a better choice, offering 15–20g of protein with no added sugar. You can always add fresh fruits or spices like sweet cinnamon for flavor without added sugar.
- Oatmeal: prepackaged oatmeal can contain 12–15 grams of added sugar per serving, similar to a glazed donut. Additionally, finely milled oats (as in “instant” oatmeal) can cause blood sugar spikes by itself, due to the loss of fiber. Better is plain oats, and if you like, you can sweeten them naturally with sweet cinnamon and/or fresh fruit for a healthier breakfast.
- Sushi: while sushi contains nutritious fish, it often has too much white rice (and in the US, sushi rice is also often cooked with sugar to “improve” the taste and help cohesion) and sugary sauces. This makes many rolls much less healthy. So if fish (the sashimi component of sushi) is your thing, then focus on that, and minimize sugar intake for a more balanced meal.
- Baked beans: store-bought baked beans can have up to 25g of added sugar per cup, similar to soda. Better to opt for plain beans and prepare them at home so that nothing is in them except what you personally put there.
- Deli meats: deli meats are convenient but often are more processed than they look, containing preservatives linked to health risks. Fresh, unprocessed meats like chicken or turkey breast are healthier and can still be cost-effective when bought in bulk.
- Fruit juices: fruit juices lack fiber (meaning their own natural sugars also become harmful, with no fiber to slow them down) and often contain added sugars too. Eating whole fruits is a much better way to get fiber, nutrients, and controlled healthy sugar intake.
- Hazelnut spread: hazelnut spreads are usually 50% added sugar and contain unhealthy oils like palm oil. So, skip those, and enjoy natural nut butters for healthier fats and proteins.
- Granola: granola is often loaded with added sugars and preservatives, so watch out for those.
- Sports drinks: sports drinks, with 20–25g of added sugar per serving, are unnecessary and unhelpful (except, perhaps, in case of emergency for correcting diabetic hypoglycemia). Stick to water or electrolyte drinks—and even in the latter case, check the labels for added sugar and excessive sodium!
- Dark chocolate: dark chocolate with 80% or more cocoa has health benefits but still typically contains a lot of added sugar. Check labels carefully!
For more on each of these, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
From Apples to Bees, and High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
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5 Things To Know About Passive Suicidal Ideation
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If you’ve ever wanted to go to sleep and never wake up, or have some accident/incident/illness take you with no action on your part, or a loved one has ever expressed such thoughts/feelings to you… Then this video is for you. Dr. Scott Eilers explains:
Tired of living
We’ll not keep them a mystery; here are the five things that Dr. Eilers wants us to know about passive suicidal ideation:
- What it is: a desire for something to end your life without taking active steps. While it may seem all too common, it’s not necessarily inevitable or unchangeable.
- What it means in terms of severity: it isn’t a clear indicator of how severe someone’s depression is. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person’s depression is mild; it can be severe even without active suicidal thoughts, or indeed, suicidality at all.
- What it threatens: although passive suicidal ideation doesn’t usually involve active planning, it can still be dangerous. Over time, it can evolve into active suicidal ideation or lead to risky behaviors.
- What it isn’t: passive suicidal ideation is different from intrusive thoughts, which are unwanted, distressing thoughts about death. The former involves a desire for death, while the latter does not.
- What it doesn’t have to be: passive suicidal ideation is often a symptom of underlying depression or a mood disorder, which can be treated through therapy, medication, or a combination of both. Seeking treatment is crucial and can be life-changing.
For more on all of the above, here’s Dr. Eilers with his own words:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- The Mental Health First Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← about depression generally
- How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To) ← about suicidality specifically
Take care!
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Brown Rice vs Russet Potatoes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing brown rice to russet potatoes, we picked the rice.
Why?
First we’ll note: for brevity and to avoid undue repetitiveness, we’re henceforth going to just say “rice” and “potato”, respectively, but values and conclusions are still for brown rice and russet potatoes. Also, we are including the flesh and skin into the metrics for the potato (without the skin, many nutrients are no longer present).
In terms of macros, the rice has more fiber, carbs, and protein. It’s difficult to compare glycemic indices in this case, because they both need cooking before eating, and how one cooks them (and whether one cools them) along with other preparatory methods will change the GI considerably. Thus, we’ll simply go with the more nutritionally dense option, and that’s the rice.
In the category of vitamins, the rice has much more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, E, and choline, while the potato has more of vitamins C and K. A clear win for rice (and by the way, that’s 60x the vitamin E, but as potatoes don’t have much vitamin E, in practical terms, it’s actually the B-vitamins where rice’s strengths really show, as potatoes aren’t a bad source but rice is amazing).
When it comes to minerals, rice has a lot more copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc, while potato has more calcium and potassium. Another easy win for rice.
You may be wondering about phytic acid: brown rice contains this by default, and it is something of an antinutrient (i.e., if left as-is, it reduces the bioavailability of other nutrients), and/but the phytic acid content is reduced to negligible by two things: soaking and heating (especially if those two things are combined) ← doing this the way described results in bioavailability of nutrients that’s even better than if there were just no phytic acid, albeit it requires you having the time to soak, and do so at temperature.
All in all, adding up the sections makes for an overall win for brown rice, but by all means enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like:
Carb-Strong or Carb-Wrong? Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?
Enjoy!
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Unleashing Your Best Skin – by Jennifer Sun
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The author, an aesthetician with a biotech background, explains about the overlap of skin health and skin beauty, making it better from the inside first (diet and other lifestyle factors), and then tweaking things as desired from the outside.
In the broad category of “tweakments” as she puts it, she covers most of the wide array of modern treatments available at many skin care clinics and the options for which at-home do-it-yourself kits are available—and the pros and cons of various approaches.
And yes, those methods do range from microneedling and red light therapy to dermal fillers and thread lifts. Most of them are relatively non-invasive though.
She also covers common ailments of the skin, and how to identify and treat those quickly and easily, without making things worse along the way.
One last thing she also includes is dealing with unwanted hairs—being a very common side-along issue when it comes to aesthetic medicine.
The book is broadly aimed at women, but hormones are not a main component discussed (except in the context of acne), so there’s no pressing reason why this book couldn’t benefit men too. It also addresses considerations when it comes to darker skintones, something that a lot of similar books overlook.
Bottom line: if you find yourself mystified by the world of skin treatment options and wondering what’s really best for you without the bias of someone who’s trying to sell you a particular treatment, then this is the book for you.
Click here to check out Unleashing Your Best Skin, and unleash your best skin!
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Green Coffee Bean Extract: Coffee Benefits Without The Coffee?
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Coffee is, on balance, very good for the health in moderation. We wrote about it here:
The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)
Some quick facts before moving on:
- Coffee is the world’s biggest source of antioxidants
- 65% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s for coffee-drinkers
- 67% reduced risk of type 2 diabetes for coffee-drinkers
- 43% reduced risk of liver cancer for coffee-drinkers
- 53% reduced suicide risk for coffee-drinkers
Those are some compelling statistics!
But what about the caffeine content?
Assuming one doesn’t have a caffeine sensitivity, caffeine is also healthy in moderation—but it is easy to accidentally become dependent on it, so it can be good to take a “tolerance break” once in a while, and then reintroduce it with more modest moderation:
Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?
We also, for that matter, have discussed its impact on the gut:
Coffee & Your Gut ← surprise, it’s a positive impact
What if I don’t like coffee?
We suspect that, having seen the title of this article, you know what the answer’s going to be here:
Green coffee bean extract is the extract from green (i.e. unroasted) coffee beans. It has one or two advantages over drinking coffee:
- For those who do not like drinking coffee, this supplement sidesteps that neatly
- Roasting coffee beans destroys a lot (sometimes almost all; it depends on the temperature and duration) of their chlorogenic acid, a highly beneficial polyphenol; using unroasted (i.e. green) coffee beans avoids that
See: Role of roasting conditions in the level of chlorogenic acid content in coffee beans
All about GCE and CGA
That’s “green coffee extract” and “chlorogenic acid”, respectively, bearing in mind that the latter is found generously in the former.
As to what it does:
❝CGA is an important and biologically active dietary polyphenol, playing several important and therapeutic roles such as antioxidant activity, antibacterial, hepatoprotective, cardioprotective, anti-inflammatory, antipyretic, neuroprotective, anti-obesity, antiviral, anti-microbial, anti-hypertension, free radicals scavenger and a central nervous system (CNS) stimulator. Furthermore, CGA causes hepatoprotective effects.❞
👆 Those are the things we know for sure that it does. And it may do even more things:
❝In addition, it has been found that CGA could modulate lipid metabolism and glucose in both genetically and healthy metabolic related disorders. It is speculated that CGA can perform crucial roles in lipid and glucose metabolism regulation and thus help to treat many disorders such as hepatic steatosis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity as well.❞
Read in full: Chlorogenic acid (CGA): A pharmacological review and call for further research
About lipid metabolism…
- Green coffee extract supplementation significantly reduces serum total cholesterol levels.
- Green coffee extract supplementation significantly reduces serum LDL (“bad” cholesterol) levels.
- Increases in HDL (“good” cholesterol) after green coffee bean extract consumption are significant in green coffee bean extract dosages ≥400mg/day.
About blood glucose and insulin…
- Green coffee extract supplementation significantly improved fasting blood sugar levels
- Green coffee extract supplementation at ≥400 mg/day significantly lowered postprandial insulin levels (that’s good)
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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The Midlife Cyclist – by Phil Cavell
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Whether stationary cycling in your living room, or competing in the Tour de France, there’s a lot more to cycling than “push the pedals”—if you want to get good benefits and avoid injury, in any case.
This book explores the benefits of different kinds of cycling, the biomechanics of various body positions, and the physiology of different kinds of performance, and the impact these things have on everything from your joints to your heart to your telomeres.
The style is very much conversational, with science included, and a readiness to acknowledge in cases where the author is guessing or going with a hunch, rather than something being well-evidenced. This kind of honesty is always good to see, and it doesn’t detract from where the science is available and clear.
One downside for some readers will be that while Cavell does endeavour to cover sex differences in various aspects of how they relate to the anatomy and physiology (mostly: the physiology) of cycling, the book is written from a male perspective and the author clearly understands that side of things better. For other readers, of course, this will be a plus.
Bottom line: if you enjoy cycling, or you’re thinking of taking it up but it seems a bit daunting because what if you do it wrong and need a knee replacement in a few years or what if you hurt your spine or something, then this is the book to set your mind at ease, and put you on the right track.
Click here to check out The Midlife Cyclist, and enjoy the cycle of life!
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Little Treatments, Big Effects – by Dr. Jessica Schleider
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The author, a clinical psychologist, discusses how mental healthcare has come a very long way, yet still has a long way to go. While advocating for top-down reforms, she does have a stopgap solution:
Find ways to significantly improve people’s mental health in a single-session intervention.
This seems like a tall order, but her method is based on good science, and also, most people will agree from experience that big changes can happen to someone in the space of moments, at pivotal turning points in life—they just have to be the right moments.
Dr. Schleider recommends that therapists train in (and then offer) this method, but she does also give comprehensive advice for self-therapy of this kind too.
These self-therapy directions, ways to induce those life-pivoting moments for the better, are perhaps the greatest value that the book gives us.
Bottom line: if you’d like a lot of the benefits of therapy without getting therapy, this book can definitely point you in the right direction, in a manner that won’t be a drain on your time or your wallet.
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