How to tell if the food’s healthy or not? (Food Battles)
Hello dear readers today, I’m going to cover a very simple way to figure out which foods are healthy and which foods are not. let’s do it. Everywhere you look these days there’s conflicting advice. one day food is terrible for you, the next day it’s fine, the next day It’s terrible again. Honestly, who can keep up with this stuff not most of us according to a survey of 2000 consumers almost 80% of people are confused by health and nutrition messages.
It’s a little too on the nose or You know what we could do it we could call it hunger games because it’s basically two foods that are anyway. Alright, let’s start our little investigation by looking at eggs. Very common food and very misunderstood so let’s just pull out Old Faithful over here and let’s see what we can find but before we start here’s the question of the day: what contains more iron, eggs or lentils? We’ll find out in a minute. and no it’s not a tie. There is a clear winner Okay back to our food battle.
Let’s start with a simple google search a right on the search page without needing to visit a link we have on the right side here this nutritional information table, and so we see that for one egg it weighs about 50 grams has 78 calories 5 grams of fat 187 MGS of cholesterol, etc. Etc. So, let’s compare it to lentils, for example. obviously you can do this with any foods you like. This is just an exercise. Then we go to the nutritional information on the right.
Let’s put them side by side so it’s easier to compare a hundred grams of each and there are some big differences. fat, for example, 11 grams in eggs and only 0.4 in lentils and so on down the list Ok, but what do all these numbers actually mean? We need something to use as a reference. The USDA’s latest dietary guidelines recommend a diet low in saturated fat mainly due to the risks of heart disease, and they go on to specify “people should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible” and finally both the USDA and the American Heart Association have recommended a minimum of 25 to 30 grams of fibre per day.
Whereas Americans on average eat only half that amount there are other parameters as well in the recommendations, but for now, we’ll keep it simple and stick to these main ones, so we’re shooting for low saturated fat low cholesterol and a solid amount of fibre Ok, now that we have a solid scoring system, let’s take another look at our food battle. Obviously eggs are very high in fat and if we look only at saturated fat the difference is even more striking 33 times more saturated fat in eggs, so lentils win that round easily Cholesterol is pretty clear too. eggs are extremely high in cholesterol.
Whereas lentils have zero, that’s another easy one and finally fibre, eight grams in lentils and zero in eggs. So just going by the USDA guidelines it’s pretty much a landslide for lentils. another interesting thing here, the protein they both have a substantial amount, a bit more on the eggs, but lots of protein in both. Beyond these main guidelines, if we look at micronutrients, there are some differences, for example, eggs have vitamin D and B12 Lentils don’t. and iron interestingly, although we tend to associate iron with animal products.
Regards
TMS
