8 health foods that aren’t healthy

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Carolyn Thomas

Check out a jar of Smucker’s Reduced Fat Creamy Peanut Butter. Its label claims: “25% less fat than regular natural peanut butter”. But although Smucker’s has indeed removed some of the fat from the peanut butter, they’ve replaced it with something called maltodextrin, a carbohydrate used as a cheap filler in many processed foods.

Warning: this means you’re being duped into trading the healthy fat from nuts for empty carbs, double the sugar, and a savings of a meager 10 calories. Continue reading →

“McStatins” with your burger and fries?

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Carolyn Thomas

You’ve seen the antacid TV ads. People (why are they usually dorky-looking men?) stuffing overflowing forkfuls of sugary, fatty, spicy, fiery, salty, bacon-y, cheesy, food-like substances into their mouths as if they’re in training for the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog-Eating Contest on Coney Island. Luckily for these hungry guys, and thanks to the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, the ads promise that just popping a magic pill before mealtime will let them pig out with heartburn-free impunity.

That’s what came to mind when I heard of a group of British cardiologists who proposed a radical (and, I hope, tongue-in-cheek) strategy to neutralize the risk of cardiovascular disease caused by those pesky unhealthy eating habits of ours. We just need to pop a statin drug, they say, before scarfing down that Big Mac – the so-called McStatin protocol. Continue reading →