Water Education - Water and Health

Top Ten of the Least Healthy Foods

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There are so many foods were are told to avoid. There are so many types of fats, nutrients, minerals, and the like that are said to cause an illness or a disease. It is hard to keep up with all the latest food trends and sometimes, it is hard to believe everything you read or hear. However, when something lays it out in black and white that it has hundreds of calories, it might be worth skipping. We scoured the web to find a list of the top ten foods that we should avoid. Depending on who you ask, the list could vary a great deal. But, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, these are ten foods you should never eat:

  • Pepperidge Farm's Original Flaky Crust Roasted Chicken Pot Pie has 510 calories and 9 grams of saturated fat per serving. But hang on. Most would probably eat the whole pie or two servings. So double that. That's 1,000 calories and 18 grams of saturated fat, plus 13 grams of hidden trans fat. This is far more than one day's required amount.
  • McDonald's claims their new Chicken Selects Premium Breast Strips are made of "premium-quality, 100% white chicken breast meat." But, a standard, five-strip order has 630 calories and 11 grams of artery-clogging fat, which is about the same as the Big Mac! It gets worse. The Big Mac has only 1,010 mg of sodium compared to the Select strips 1,550 mg. That's not counting the dipping sauce!
  • The Cheesecake Factory's Six Carb Original Cheesecake has 610 calories, only 20 calories less than their Original Cheesecake. The site compares this to having an eight-ounce prime rib for dessert. The slice has 29 grams of saturated fat, one and a half of the day's supply.
  • Marie Callender's Herb Roasted Chicken with Mashed Potatoes, Broccoli Florets & Carrots frozen dinner has 530 calories, 12 grams of saturated fat, and 1,270 mg of sodium. Sounds like a healthy meal, but we'd be better off with a Big Mac.
  • Mrs. Fields Milk Chocolate & Walnuts cookie- a single cookie- has more than 300 calories and as much saturated fat as a 12-ounce sirloin steak? It's also got six teaspoons of sugar.
  • Starbucks' Venti Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino Blended Crème with whipped cream is more of a thick milkshake than it is a coffee. It has 770 calories and 19 grams of fat- 10 of them saturated. Its nutrition is equivalent of a Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pepperoni Pizza.
  • Burger King's fries, the King size, packs 600 calories- 75% of your daily maximum for heart-unhealthy fat.
  • Campbell's red-and-white-label condensed soups are brimming with salt: Half a can average about half of a person's daily quota of salt. Their Healthy Select line does not have as much salt.
  • Swoops, which are Hershey candy bars in the shape of Pringles, have almost 200 calories, seven to eight grams of saturated fat, and more than four teaspoons of sugar into each six-pack. York Swoops have more than three times as much saturated fat as a York Peppermint Pattie, and Reese's Swoops have roughly twice as much as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
  • We've saved the best for last. A Häagen-Dazs Mint Chip Dazzler, which is a sundae with three scoops of ice cream, hot fudge, Oreos, chocolate sprinkles, and whipped cream, has 1,270 calories and 38 grams of saturated fat. That's two days' worth!

So, now that you know what ten of the most unhealthy foods are, just what do you do when you want to indulge. Detoxing after scarfing down any of these items may be a good idea. A detox diet is a dietary regimen that involves a temporary change in consumption habits in an attempt to detoxify the body by removal of toxins or other contaminants. This is usually done after eating lots of unhealthy or processed foods, and some people do it at the start of new diets. Detox diets are claimed to improve health, energy, resistance to disease, mental state, digestion, as well as aiding in weight loss.

There are various methods of detox dieting which include fasting with water. Here, one would drink only water for a set period of time to flush out the system. There are also juice-fasting diets.

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