Eat Healthy-Nutritional Label Part 3-Ingredients to Avoid

This is the final part of my 3 series of articles on Eating Healthy-How to Read, Analyse and Understand Nutrition Label. Learn about High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hydrogenated Oils, Refined Flour and etc here!!

In the past 2 articles, we have thoroughly learned the most efficient way of reading and understanding nutritional labels of food products, with making reference to various nutritional labels from Nutritiondata.com and the US FDA official site.

Learning to read and understand a nutritional label is a very important step when it comes to selecting and purchasing food products for your consumption. Besides being able to do the above, it is essential for you to look at the content or ingredients of the food products that you intent to purchase!!

If the food product contains ANY of these 4 ingredients.....do not consume them:-

1. High Fructose Corn Syrup

Often when we come across this ingredient....we believe that it is some kind of sugar syrup. High fructose corn syrup basically refers to processed glucose which is later mixed with 100% pure corn syrup. It is normally used in soft drinks and baked products. Highly processed sugar!!

2. Hydrogenated Palm or any kind of Vegetable Oil

Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil ( it can be peanut, soy bean, palm or other form of vegetable oil ) refers to Trans Fat!! Trans Fat is the worst form of bad fat...which must be avoided. When vegetable oils (for eg peanut, soy bean and palm oil) are processed, they turn into a white, solid substance which nutritionists refer to as hydrogenated oil ( or commonly known as trans fat ). Hydrogenated Oil can cause heart diseases, cholesterol and blood pressure when consumed in abundance. It is commonly found in peanut butters, biscuits, cookies and all fried foods.

This is the main reason why we should avoid any kind of fried foods. Always try cooking your raw poultry, seafood and vegetables by steaming or stewing them. Did you know that healthy nuts such as walnuts, pecan, hazelnuts and etc turn into hydrogenated products once you fry or bake them? This is even true for healthy oils like olive and canola....Pretty suprising rite!!

3. Refined.....

The third ingredient which you have to look out for is anything which starts with the word Refined for example Refined Wheat Flour, Refined Brown Sugar or Refined Lime Juice.

Refined food refers to processed food, of which the good substances of the raw food material are omitted when processed. Let's take Refined Flour for instance...it is basically wheat flour going through processes to remove the coarse wheat substances in the wheat flour.

Thus...by refining raw food products, the natural healthy substances gets refined too!!

4. Enriched....
Another ingredient that you must be caution about is anything which starts with the word Enriched...Enriched Soy Milk and Enriched Flour. Why??? Well it is processed food materials...Avoid them as far as possible...