When you read “fat-free” on a product’s label, you typically assume healthy or at least healthier, right? Wrong. If you think low-fat, reduced-fat or fat-free foods may help you lose weight and eat healthier, you couldn’t be farthest from the truth. And the truth is that most of these products are even worse than the full-fat options.
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Not only has it been discovered that low-fat foods sold right here in Canada contain just as many calories as the usual foods, but in more cases than not these are foods loaded with chemicals and full of toxins. Here are the “fat-free” kinds of products that you should be avoiding if you’re not one for eating unhealthy foods.
Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals
Not pointing any names, but the next time you’re shopping for ready-made breakfast cereals read the ingredients list and compare that to any made-at-home muesli recipe. You’ll likely find yourself in some serious doubts about your diet.
Many of the ready-to-eat breakfast cereals with fat-free claims contain enough sugar to make-up for all the lack of fat and some extra too.
Vegetable sauces
Unless they’ve mashed vegetables, added spices and preserved the natural way, manufacturers of vegetable sauces are selling lies when promoting vegetable sauces as healthy.
Also falling into this category are purees and pastes. Look out for unhealthy and falsely claimed fat-free Schezwan sauce, salsa dips, soya sauces, red chili sauce, any kind of vegetable sauces really.
Sour cream
A typical sour cream ingredients list reads something like this: cultured cream, whey, starch, sodium phosphate, sodium citrate, guar gum, potassium sorbate, locust bean gum, guar gum, calcium sulfate and carrageenan, give or take one or two ingredients.
A typical low-fat sour cream ingredients list is very similar to its full-fat counterpart, only with cultured low-fat milk but every other ingredient is still there and a few others too. The added disadvantage to low-fat sour cream is that producers put various other additives in the food so that it resembles the full-fat option in taste and texture.
Mayonnaise dressing
There’s good fat, and there’s bad fat, and then there’s low-fat mayonnaise which is definitely not the kind of fat you want in your body.
You will find few if any options for healthy mayonnaise unless it’s homemade or commercially prepared homemade-style. But mayonnaise is typically a fatty food made of egg yolk and oil essentially, and no matter how you’d spin the recipe, there is no way to work around the fat content. For store-bought mayonnaise with 1 gram of fat per serving you get a bigger dose of unhealthy ingredients.
Baked goods
One of the tricks that manufacturers use is reducing the amount of fat in a product but increasing the amount of sugar and other bad ingredients. So while your morning muffin may pack less fat than a regular one it could contain twice as much sugar considering the high fructose corn syrup so many products contain.
The only low-fat baked goods that replace full-fat products would have to be produced with substitutes like fruit purees, which isn’t the case for most producers.