Often times when people want to eat healthy food, they focus on the actual food too much and lose track of the unhealthy things they are smothering the food in.  For example, a healthy slice of whole wheat bread can be totally ruined by lots of margarine and jelly.  The margarine adds lots of unnecessary saturated fats, (which clog arteries) and most jelly is high in high-fructose corn syrup (which is worse than regular sugar because the fructose by-passes your metabolism).  So in the end, the calories from your slice of toast may end up coming half and half from the bread and then from the sugar and fat.  Instead of being totally afraid of calories like many people are, it is important to be conscious of where they are coming from.  The most important thing in your diet is eating nutritiously.  If half your calories are coming from sugar, your nutrition is basically sunk. 
So, if you love your toast in the morning and want to know how to improve it, start by eating whole wheat bread and spreading it with nut butter instead of margarine.  It may be more caloric, but it at least has nutritious protein, fiber and good oils.  Next, leave off the jelly and try Wegman's Triple Fruit Spreads.  They taste just as good as jelly but don't have high-fructose corn syrup and have half the calories from sugar.

A topic that I have often considered quite ironic is salads. Whenever someone wants to feel really healthy the first thing that they turn to is a salad. Now don't get me wrong. I love salads, but my last post about my high fructose corn syrup searching trip to Wegmans got me thinking about all of the things that we put on salads.  I don't know about you, but there a few things that I find to be absolutely essential to my salad.  I love salad dressing and I love eating croutons.  Well now we know that the salad dressing is sugar laden, but did you ever consider how many calories are added with the croutons, the cheese, the bacon bits etc? To my surprise one day standing in Wendy's waiting for my food I saw the nutrition chart on the wall.  I expected that the salads would be the most healthy, but I couldn't believe it when I saw that their Baja Salad had a whopping 540 calories which comprised, 32 grams fat, 14 grams saturated fat, and 1600 mg sodium (70% daily value)! But that's not the worst of it.  The salad by itself is 540 calories, while the dressing and added tortilla strips knocked the total up to 720 calories. That is nearly half of your daily calories just in one sitting. Plus, who goes to McDonalds and doesn't get a drink to go with their food?

So, the moral of the story isn't "Don't eat salads!", but rather watch what goes into your salad. Chicken in salads is better grilled than fried. If you like crunch, add apples instead of croutons.  Skip the cheese and try oil and vinegar dressing instead of processed dressings.

Another thing to think about is this. Is getting a salad that is primarily stocked with calories from fat better than just getting a nutritious small meal? For my part I'd rather go for Wendy's chili, which is more nutritious and less fat laden than their salads...

First posts are boring. I know. You don't have to read this one if you don't want to. I'm not going to give you an overinflated description of how quirky I am, so I'm just going to plunge right in.  My biochemistry professor explained to the class last week how fructose bypasses the regulation points in your metabolism and makes you fatter than regular sugar.  Okay, let's face it. Sugar is sugar.  The first culprit that comes to mind is high fructose corn syrup, but in reality, depending on the percentage of fructose in it, sucrose (table sugar) is nearly as bad with 50% fructose.

Okay, so sugar makes you fat.  We all knew that already....but do you really know how much sugar is in your diet?  Cruising the aisles at Wegmans today I was shocked by the sugar content of seemingly harmless foods.  I had a craving for beets today.  Yeah, I know that's not normal, but I did.  So I headed down the canned food aisle for my beets and grabbed the first one that came to hand.  Aunt Nellie's pickled beets. Boy, do they look good.  And then I flipped the can over and looked at the label.  High fructose corn syrup right after beets and water.  So I opted for the canned beets that had no sugar in them.

I know that's probably not a good example since the average american doesn't head right for the beet aisle, so I'll share another shocking revelation from my morning shopping excursion.  Then next item on the list was salad dressing.  I'm a person of habit and I love my Italian salad dressing.  It's really the only type I usually eat.  I happily headed over to the dressings and grabbed Wegmans brand.  Since I was in the label reading mood I took a peak at the ingredients and became outraged.  High fructose corn syrup in my salad dressing!  What is this Wegmans? You're my go to for quality store brand food.  I turned over every other bottle there and found sugar in each.  I can see why we need sugar in baked goods, but salad dressing?  I finally hit upon the only one on the shelf that didn't contain either high fructose corn syrup or MSG, the Hidden Valley Farm House Original dressing. It still had sugar, but at least it wasn't high fructose...

It was all downhill from there.  I found that all of the gherkins had high fructose corn syrup.  And the ketchup had sugar, the bread had sugar, the tomato sauce had sugar. No wonder America has problem with obesity.  We stick sugar into anything we can lay our hands on.  Everything that doesn't need sugar.