Monday, July 4, 2011

FOOD RULES - RULE #5

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY !!

from "Food Rules: An Eater's Manual" by Michael Pollan

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PART I: What Should I Eat?
(Eat food.)

RULE #5: Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.

Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar. (For an exception to this rule, see Rule #60, regarding special occasion foods). Complicating matters is the fact that, thanks to food science, there are now some forty types of sugar used in processed food, including:

barley malt
beet sugar
brown rice sugar
cane juice
corn sweetener
dextrin
dextrose
fructo-oligosaccharides
fruit juice concentrate
glucose
sucrose
invert sugar
polydextrose
sucrose
turbinado sugar

... and so on. To repeat: Sugar is sugar. And organic sugar is sugar, too. As for noncaloric sweeteners such as aspartame or Splenda, research (in both humans and animals) suggests that switching to artificial sweeteners does not lead to weight loss for reasons not yet well understood. But it may be that deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.

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"Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

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