Claims to Healthy Eating Approaches That Are Just…Not

Why bother?

What is the point of stating that something is a healthy food choice when it’s just outright rubbish?  

We see this time and time again.  

Sugar-rich cereals that claim to be a great source of calcium.   Enriched white bread whose package screams how much fiber it contains.   Entire, neatly branded approaches to eating that pretend to have the consumer’s best interest at heart yet suggest using margarine and low calorie, packaged snack  items  as great options for on the go snacks.

Even worse, perhaps, is the number of consumers who actually believe what they’re being fed- both literally and figuratively.

Take the abundance of wrong information in the media and  combine it with not believing that healthy eating can actually be one in the same with a very satisfying, tasty, vast array of real, fresh food and add a dose of the impatience with wanting results yesterday and the result is a disastrous roller coaster of yo-yo dieting, binging an purging, self-loathing, depression, sickness or a combination of all of the above.

What if we just called  a spade a spade?   Would it really change the amount of product sold?

I doubt it.

Let’s use ice cream as an example.  Will people buy and eat more if they try to justify it by telling themselves it’s just a bone-building, great way to get calcium and vitamin D?   What if it was just packaged as …. ice cream?

I don’t have the answers.

It just bothers me to no end to see people inhaling 60 ounce vats of sweetened green tea under the impression that they’re only getting all the antioxidants from the leaves, a tiny side of steamed broccoli smothered in cheese thinking it’s a good source of veggies or, quite possibly the most common Faux (Paleo)-pas – eating copious amounts of bacon at every meal.  Not the same as a serving of wild salmon, thank you very much.

It always comes back to simple, basic common sense.

Eat veggies, with natural proteins and some healthy, unadulterated fat.  Don’t eat packaged items with ingredient labels 30 chemicals long.

And if something doesn’t sound quite right- like a cookie diet or a brownie filled with protein, even if it is vegan or ‘Paleo’, it probably just isn’t.

Go with the apple instead.