Unhealthy foods most people think are healthy

Do you know what foods are unhealthy? When examining your diet, it can be difficult to determine what foods are healthy or not.

The most common unhealthy foods include highly-processed items “such as fast foods and snack foods,” says Vilma Andari, M.S. “Highly-processed foods tend to be low in nutrients (vitamins, minerals and antioxidants) and high on empty calories due to the content of refined flours, sodium and sugar.”

Examples of processed foods include:

• Chips
• Cookies
• Cakes
• Sugar cereals

What makes food unhealthy?

“The preparation method and the types of ingredients the food contains make it unhealthy,” says Andari. “Sodium, sugar and fat (saturated fat and trans-fat) are key ingredients one should always monitor when eating out and shopping at the grocery store. The American Heart Association recommends keeping the consumption of saturated fat to less than 7 percent and the consumption of trans-fat to less than 1 percent of an individual’s daily calories.”

Avoid sodium, added sugar

According to the American Heart Association’s 2013 heart disease prevention guidelines, women are smart to shy away from eating foods that contain high levels of sodium and added sugar.

For optimal heart health, the American Heart Association recommends you consume:

• No more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day.
• No more than 6 teaspoons or 100 calories of sugar a day for women.

Unfortunately, the average American eats more than double their recommended sodium and sugar intake, consuming 3,600 milligrams of sodium and 22 teaspoons of sugar daily.

How to avoid unhealthy food

Andari offers several pieces of advice for how to stay away from food that is bad for you:

1. Choose processed foods carefully.
2. Avoid sodium from the six most common salty foods (bread and rolls; cold cuts and cured meats; pizza; burritos and tacos; soup; sandwiches).
3. Read food labels and stay away from items that have sugar added, excess sodium and fat.
4. Plan ahead and prepare healthy snacks and meals at home made from whole, fresh foods.
5. Choose lean meats with less than 10 percent fat.
6. Don’t skip meals (this can contribute to snacking on unhealthy foods when hungry).

We are what we eat, but we do not think that what we eat is not healthy, then we wonder why we are fattening, why we have high cholesterol, why we have cancer?

Today's food is very processed, most of it no longer contains fiber, protein, healthy sugars.

Try not to eat food that you can eat while walking.

Congestive heart failure diet

Congestive heart failure diet should be focused on avoiding salt, lipids (especially animal fats) and alcohol. Enjoying the food we eat is very important, but in time, patients with congestive heart failure will learn to like foods with lower amounts of salt. Salt is one of the most feared “enemies” for patients with heart disease, because it favors water retention and increases heart labor, edema (water retention in the tissues) and worsens heart failure symptoms.

Why is it so important to know and respect  the congestive heart failure diet?

Congestive heart failure diet is important to be respected in order to increase quality of life and slow down the disease evolution. Everyone who reads the sentence above may wonder how can congestive heart failure diet increase the quality of life, when we suppose to give up on so many daily “pleasures”. It is hard to imagine that after a so called “normal” life, when we could eat everything we wanted, one day we have to change our life and eating style completely with a congestive heart failure diet plan . Many patients are tempted to skip these rules, thinking that their physician wouldn’t notice or that a few exceptions from time to time wouldn’t harm anyone.
A congestive heart failure diet that includes avoiding lipids is a fact well known by everyone, but also by few respected. We read in many articles that there are good and bad fats and that fats will increase body weight, however, many patients with heart disease don’t respect congestive heart failure diet and gain weight even after their physician recommended they should lose weight. Once the patients become overweight, the risk of developing diabetes, atherosclerosis and therefore hypertension, coronary disease (which determines chest pain, a very often symptom among patients with coronary disease), heart attacks or strokes increases. Good fats are a source of omega-3 fatty acids, found mostly in cold-water fish, nuts, oils and seeds, and also in dark leafy greens, flaxseed oils and some vegetable oils. Omega-3 fatty acid is an “essential fatty acid,” which cannot be synthesized by our bodies, the only source for this is food. Congestive heart failure diet should contain Omega-3 fatty acids, because these essential acids can lower blood pressure, combat LDL (bad) cholesterol, also it is thought to play a role in brain protection.
Congestive heart failure diet should definitely exclude alcohol, although this is not a type of food it is often used for different, most of them groundless reasons, like routine, entourage acceptance, digestion, pain relieve. Chronic alcohol consumption can determine a type of dilated cardiomyopathy which in time will lead to congestive heart failure. However, small amounts of wine it is considered to have a favorable impact, due to its antioxidant features.
A correct congestive heart failure diet should also contain limited amounts of foods rich in sugar or carbohydrates (the main source of energy for the body, transformed into blood sugar, mostly glucose, the body’s basic fuel and also the main source of calories) like: cookies, chocolate, candies, biscuits, sweet fruits like banana, pears, strawberries, sugar as such, honey, milk, popcorn, green peas, sweet potatoes etc.

Please consult your medic about a congestive heart failure diet, and don’t eat random.