8 Toxic Terrors in your Daily Food

There will be a whole load of invitations to parties during the year-end festivities and most diets would be flushed down the drain.

Still, it’ll be sad when the Christmas tree finally has to come down but you soon realised you’re coming down with something yourself too.

The many hours of partying, feasting, and downing bottles of wine are likely to leave you with the post party-bloat which is quite unattractive and definitely, unhealthy. A good friend once joked, “If you are what you eat, then I am fat and sweet”. It sounded funny at the time, but the sentence may have more truth to it than I dared to think. But before you dismiss it thinking, “Nah, I don’t binge like that,” we urge you to reconsider the toxic terrors you might unconsciously be ingesting on a daily basis. And we all know the daily habits are the worst.

Your Daily Latte

The benefits of caffeine or lack of it is a constant debate. But while you sit sipping your late and wait for the scientists’ final verdict, be aware that you’re consuming more fats and sugar than you can afford. Your daily caramel latte has enough full fat milk and sugar that could average a medium sized chocolate bar.

Your Alcohol

A glass of red once in a while may have some health benefits. Problem is, in this day and age, we never stop at one glass especially when you find that buying a bottle is cheaper than going by glasses. Line up the men in a bar and they can easily perform a beer belly dance for you. That’s because just one pint could contain the same number of calories as a sugary doughnut - imagine the many doughnuts that fill the jug! A pint a night could tot up to a thousand calories a week or every year, up to 6kg ! Bad for your figure, heart and your liver!

Your Fizzy Drink

One can of fizzy drink contains 6-7 teaspoons of sugar. Add that up and it totals up to 24 bags of sugar a year. Fizzy drinks are laced with additives, some of which have ben linked to health problems, including bloating, headaches, asthma, allergies, and possible hyperactivity and poor concentration in kids.

Your Happy Meal

With fast food chains popping up at every corner, it won’t be long until we eat around two billion fast food meals in a year. A Burger King® meal has around 1800 calories. That is almost all of the calories you need for a whole day, which for most people is around 2000 calories. There is a lot of fat, including over 8 grams of unhealthy trans fat.The large order of fries contains 500 calories, half of which come form fat. There are 28 grams of total fat, 6 grams of saturated fat

and 6 grams of trans fat. The french fries also have over 800 milligrams of sodium and 60 grams of total carbohydrates, no different from those pack of potato chips you’ve been trying to avoid. Also, avoid sodium and MSG intake often used in Chinese food takeaways. Try to cook at home whenever possible because only then can you monitor what goes into your mouth.

Your White Stuff

The nutritionist will tell you that to lose weight you need to cut out all the white stuff: white bread, white rice, and white pasta. Foods such as those become white after being bleached and stripped of all their nutrients. For instance, processed white bread is full of chemical improvers and double the amount of yeast that you really need, which can lead to vaginal infections and thrush.

Your Processed Meat

Processed and ground meats from supermarkets are often derived from bone, fat, gristle and skins as fillers. On top of that, fat mixture is a whole lot of other health-damaging ingredients such as gelatine, natrium, starch, preservatives and additives. You slap the ham between slices of bread to make a sandwich and use the ground meat for cooking pasta - all the while thinking you’re consuming healthy, lean meat. You’re better off substituting grilled chicken for ham and chopping your own chicken breast to ensure you get only lean meat in your cooking.

Your Chocolate and Cookies

Take a walk down the supermarket aisle. You’d notice that the imported chocolates are getting bigger and we get plenty of high-fat cookies to choose from. If you comped a standard size bar every day of the year on top of your normal daily intake, you could gain anything up to 12kg! So chocoholics be warned - it would take about 1 hour on a bike to burn off a single bar!

Your Hidden Sugar

Sugar is found in almost every food and if you’re not careful, you might be consuming additional sugar. One can of baked beans can contain up to 4 teaspoons of sugar, a tub of fruit yogurt could contain as many as 7 teaspoons of sugar. You should also avoid high sugar fruits such as mangoes, pineapples and bananas. Have them only as a treat. Choose healthier fruits such as berries, kiwis, and apples which are high in fibres.