One day, your morning cup of coffee is a great idea for your health. The next, it has too many negative health risks. Even the savviest of consumers can easily become confused amid constantly evolving research and the loud personal opinions of prominent people.
And when food marketing is thrown into the mix, the black and whites get even more gray. Packaging with words like "organic" or "natural" or "light" purposely gives us the impression it has a nutritious product to sell, when in reality there's little to formally define what those terms mean.
"There is so much nutrition misinformation out there," says Appetite for Health's Julie Upton, MS, RD, CSSD, "and add on the fact that marketers often use 'health halo' descriptors to sell products, it's no wonder Americans are confused about what's really healthy to eat."
To help clear up some of the confusion, we asked a group of nutrition experts to dish on the healthy eating concepts we're most commonly misusing.
Here are eight of the worst offenders.
"Detox"
If I could erase one word from the dietary dictionary it would be 'detox'. The idea that certain foods or nutrients will speed up or enhance your body's detoxification process is just silly. The best way to help your body get the toxins out is to put fewerin."
--Monica Reinagel, MS, LDN, CNS, HuffPost blogger and author of Nutrition Diva's Secrets for A Healthy Diet
"Good" Foods And "Bad" Foods
--Elisa Zied, MS, RDN, CDN, author of Younger Next Week
"Clean"
--Julie Upton, MS, RD, CSSD, Appetite for Health
"I shy away from the term 'clean eating'. I appreciate that people use the term to describe eating plans that include high-quality, unprocessed foods and perhaps organic and locally-grown foods, and I applaud their efforts to eat nutritious foods. But I have a hard time with the clean-eating label because it makes me think that if you're not eating 'clean' then you're eating 'dirty.' Also, clean eating doesn't necessarily equal a balanced diet. As much as I've tried to embrace the clean eating term, I sense some shame in it. For example, people may feel bad that they can't 'eat clean,' because the cost is prohibitive or it's inconvenient. And I sometimes get the idea that die-hard clean eaters look down on people who don't eat the same way, and that they use the term to define themselves rather than their eating. I'd love it if we could ditch the eating labels and try to eat the fewest processed foods possible as part of a balanced diet we can afford and live with in the long-run."
--Elizabeth M. Ward, RD, author of MyPlate for Moms, How to Feed Yourself & Your Family Better
--Elizabeth M. Ward, RD, author of MyPlate for Moms, How to Feed Yourself & Your Family Better
"Low-Carb"
"Gluten-Free"
"Fruit Has Too Much Sugar"
"Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal Of The Day"
--Joy Bauer, MS, RDN, health and nutrition expert for the "Today" show and founder of Nourish Snacks.
"Made With Simple Ingredients"
I'm all for foods with a single ingredient, like apples, bananas, broccoli, nuts, eggs, lean meats and fish, to name a few. They're all as simple as foods can come and are loaded with nutrition and provide major health benefits. We'd all be healthier and live longer if we ate single-ingredient foods most of the time.
The new 'simple' foods I'm talking about are things like gourmet ice cream, cookies, candy, butter and other foods that may contain just a few ingredients. The problem is, those simple, all-natural ingredients don't provide a nutritional punch. I'm talking about sugar, cream, salt and oil. There is no shortfall of these 'simple' ingredients in the typical American diet, so positioning them as a health bonus is just, well, bogus."
--Upton
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