1 – Canned Soup
Mmmmm, mmmmm…not so good. Regularly eating canned soups that you find at the supermarket is really one of the worst things you can do for yourself as they’re notorious for high levels of Trans-fat, sodium, and often, artificial preservatives like MSG.
Suddenly the vegetable-barley soup that you thought was doing your body a favor is really just doing the opposite.
On average, one cup of canned soup has almost 1,000 milligrams of salt in it. When you consider that your daily intake of salt shouldn’t exceed 2,400 milligrams, and that basically nobody eats just a single cup of soup, you start to realize just how much sodium that really is.
After discovering just how much salt is packed into these small cans, we decided we’d only cook our own soup from that point forward. We bought a few boxes of Campbell’s Chicken Stock, patting ourselves on the back and pointing out to each other that we even got the version that boasted 25% less sodium… But as we soon noticed, even that was listed at 18%!
During our next trip to the supermarket, we managed to find a no-name organic brand that was only a few cents more and was head and shoulders above the rest at –get this – only 2% sodium!
It tastes just as good if not better - and this way, if we felt like it we had the option to sprinkle a tiny bit more salt on for ourselves if we felt the urge. Remember, it’s very easy to add salt on your own, but you can’t take out what’s already in the mix.
2 – Breakfast Cereals
Sure we know that the Lucky Charms, Cap ‘n Crunches and Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs of the world aren’t nutritious for you and will occasionally turn the milk they’re floating in a nasty, sludgy shade of brown, but these days more and more nutritionists seem to be hinting that other cereals aren’t all that much better for you either.
We’ve all heard the commercials go on and on about how their products are chalked full of healthy whole grains, but apparently those stop being so great for you after they’ve been processed to go into a box of cereal.
By having them processed, puffed or turned into some kind of flake, what originally started off as a healthy whole grain eventually reaches the point where you’re not getting anywhere near the nutritional value out of it that you should.
Or take a cereal like Raisin Bran. When you look at it as a simple combination of raisins and bran, you think to yourself that it must be pretty good for you, right? But a quick look at the label would show you that they douse this mix in high-fructose corn-syrup, sending the sugar content skyrocketing to 19grams. Suddenly it’s on the same sugar level as Cap ‘n Crunch while also containing 350 milligrams of sodium at the same time.
3 – Diet Sodas/Aspartame
You probably know artificial sweetener by the name Aspartame, just like you probably know it shows up in lots of products marked “diet” suggesting that it’s better for you than the original. This however, is not the case.
As bad as the sugar in a product might be for you, ironically it’s still much healthier than Aspartame, which is basically nothing more than a mild poison. Despite an FDA board of inquiry’s report whose findings discouraged Aspartame to be used in food, the FDA commissioner at the time, Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes, overrode their decision and had it approved.
Shortly afterwards, he quit his job at the FDA and went to work in a public relations position for the pharmaceutical company that produced Aspartame and had pushed hard for its approval. The good doctor made a whack of cash in the process, and something that should never have been consumed by people was suddenly being put into all kinds of foods.
When the body metabolizes Aspartame, it breaks down into methanol, which is then converted to formaldehyde – a neurotoxin that causes damage to your nervous system. Even if Aspartame is consumed in very small quantities, if done everyday for long periods of time it can prove to be toxic and cause reactions like anxiety attacks, asthma, chronic fatigue, depression, heart palpitations, insomnia, and vision loss just to name a few.
Oh, and weight gain too, which seems counter productive to something being “diet”. So if you’re going to have something sweet, you may as well just go with sugar, because there are obviously a lot worse things out there you can be putting in your body.