Faculty of Allied Health Sciences > Nutrition and Food Engineering

Diet Myths, Facts and Tips

<< < (2/5) > >>

nfe fouzia:
Diet Myth
"Weight problems are often the result of an intolerance to wheat"
Diet Facts

With so much written about wheat-free diets, it’s easy to think an intolerance to wheat is to blame for those excess pounds. However, experts suggest that less than 0.1 percent of the population suffer from this condition.

Support for the idea that weight gain – or difficulty in losing weight – is caused by a wheat intolerance stems mainly from people who’ve followed a wheat-free diet and found they’ve lost weight as a result.

Unsurprisingly though, most experts believe any weight loss that occurs is due to a reduction in calories and fat, thanks to cutting out not just bread, pasta and many cereals, but also biscuits, cakes, pastries, pizza, puddings and processed foods such as battered fish or breaded chicken. In other words, if you stop eating wheat, you also de-junk your diet and fill up on healthier and lower-calorie alternatives such as fruit, veg, lean meat, fish and low-fat dairy products.
Diet Tips

Don’t just cut out wheat on a whim. If you really believe you are intolerant to wheat, keep a food and symptoms diary to see if there’s any connection with what you eat and the symptoms you suffer with – then see your GP for a proper diagnosis.

In the meantime, cutting down on high-fat, processed wheat products will certainly help you lose weight. Instead, choose high-fibre wheat products such as wholegrain breakfast cereals, Granary bread and wholewheat pasta.

nfe fouzia:
Diet Myth
"Frozen or canned fruits and vegetables contain less vitamins than fresh ones"
Diet Facts

Frozen or canned fruits and vegetables can be just as nutritious as fresh ones, if not more so. Frozen or canned fruit and veg are often packaged within hours of being picked so they don’t lose many nutrients.

On the other hand, fresh fruit and veg can sometimes lose many of their vitamins if they’ve travelled long distances and are stored for days on end before reaching the supermarket shelves.
Diet Tips

Regardless of whether you buy fresh, frozen or canned fruit and veg, aim for five different servings each day – they all count! But look for canned veg that are in unsalted, unsweetened water, and fruit that’s in juice rather than syrup.

nfe fouzia:
Diet Myth
"Margarine is healthier and lower in fat than butter"
Diet Facts

Often hailed as a healthy alternative to butter, margarines aren’t always a better choice. To start with, ordinary margarines contain just as much fat and as many calories as butter and so offer no real slimming benefits. Worse still, they may also contain hydrogenated vegetable oils, which create trans fats – and these are thought to be as harmful to our heart health as saturates.

Ironically, it’s the processing of pure vegetable oils – a good source of heart-friendly polyunsaturates – that creates these trans fats! In the meantime, low-fat or reduced-fat spreads contain less fat and fewer calories than butter or ordinary margarines, making them a better choice if you’re counting calories – but they may still contain hydrogenated fats.
Diet Tips

If you like the taste of butter there’s no reason why you can’t include it in your diet, providing you count the calories.

Leave it out of the fridge so you can spread it thinly and use it on just one slice of bread when you make a sandwich so you get all the taste but half the calories.

If you’re worried about the trans fat content of margarines and low-fat spreads, you’ll need to scour the ingredients list for hydrogenated fats or hydrogenated vegetable oils. If a product contains either, it will almost certainly contain trans fat. Bottom line: if you’re trying to lose weight, whether you choose butter, margarine or low-fat spread, you should use them sparingly as they’re all high in total fat.

nfe fouzia:
Diet Myth
"Red meat is bad for your health because it’s high in fat"
Diet Facts

Thanks to modern breeding programmes and new trimming techniques, red meat is now leaner than it’s ever been. For example, pork has dropped from being 30% fat in the 1950s to just 4% in 2005. Meanwhile, lean beef is now as low as 5% fat and lamb, 8% fat.

Better still, while most of us think that red meat is packed with artery-clogging saturates, around half the fat in red meat is actually heart-healthy monounsaturates. In particular, red meat contains oleic acid, the same type of fat that’s found in olive oil.

Added to this, red meat is packed with a wide range of vitamins and minerals, especially iron. Around 40% of women aged between 19 and 34 have such low intakes of this nutrient that they’re at risk of suffering from anaemia, a condition that causes extreme tiredness, lack of energy and shortness of breath when exercising.
Diet Tips

Choose lean cuts of meat, trim off any visible fat before cooking and opt for cooking methods that don’t require extra fat to be added, such as grilling, griddling or dry roasting. This will help to keep fat intakes really low, while ensuring you benefit from all the nutrients in red meat.

nfe fouzia:
Diet Myth
"Cereal bars are lower in fat and sugar" than chocolate or sweets
Diet Facts

Cereal bars might sound like a healthy alternative to chocolate but check the ingredients and you’ll often find more than just oats, cereals, nuts and dried fruit.

It’s true they’re usually lower in fat than most bars of chocolate (unless they’re packed with nuts and seeds) but they often contain just as much sugar, which might appear in the ingredients list as rice syrup, maltodextrin, glucose-fructose syrup, raw cane sugar, fructose, honey, or a mixture of these.
Diet Tips

For a sweet snack, you’d be better off choosing fresh fruit. But if you fancy a sweet treat, check out the nutrition information first before spending your calories on a cereal bar. You might find smaller chocolate bars such as a Ripple, a Flake, a Crème egg or a tube of Smarties actually contain fewer calories than that healthy-sounding cereal bar!

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page