Every day it seems like there's a new diet to follow, a new trend in what foods you should be eating or avoiding, or new research proving the diet you followed five years ago was wrong all along.
If you're trying to change your lifestyle to a healthier one without a "quick fix," all this new misguiding information can seem overwhelming.
And, the tricky part is that the healthy alternatives you might have been advised to use may actually be causing bigger health problems.
Before you make any drastic changes to your diet, you may want to consider reading up on these "healthy" alternatives that are suggested to you.
For example, all the hype around artificial sugar in your foods and drinks may have caused you to wonder if you should be consuming real sugar instead. Yes, refined sugars are a problem and artificial sweeteners may have once seemed like a viable option... all the sweetness without the calories. However, aspartame, the main artificial sweetener used instead of real sugar (and which can be found in over 6,000 products and used by over 54 percent of Americans) is definitely NOT a healthy alternative.
Another healthy alternative that you may want to avoid is low-fat dressing. Choosing this dressing over the full-fat and full-calorie dressing could cause you to miss out on some significant health benefits.
A study conducted from Iowa State University in 2012 gave 29 people salads that contained butter (saturated fat), canola oil (monosaturated fat), and corn oil (polyunsaturated fat). Each of the salads contained either three, eight or 20 grams of fat to see if a fat dosage in the dressing made a difference. Those who ate their salad with corn oil and butter, the more carotenoids they absorbed. Those who ate their salads with canola oil absorbed the same amount of carotenoids whether they had three or 20 grams of the fat-based dressing.
One thing you can do to help prevent dieting mistakes is to look at food labels. More often than not, when an ingredient is taken out (for example, fat) another ingredient is added in (sugar).
What else do you need to know about healthy alternatives you should be avoiding?
Dr. Holly discusses why you should be avoiding certain healthy alternatives and why reading food labels is important when trying out a new diet.