Sunday, September 27, 2009

Avoid Falling in the Trap of These 5 Dieting Myths

By Cracky McMerlot

If a myth gets passed a lot by numerous sources in no time it gets to be an absolute truth. There are dieting and eating myths that won't hurt you at all while there are others that can put your health in danger. You just have to be careful. Here are 5 of the most common dieting myths and the truth about them:

1) Honey has fewer calories than sugar: many suggest that you can replace sugar with honey in your diet. While a spoon of sugar contains 15 calories a spoon of honey contains 65 calories. As you can see the reality is that honey contains much more calories than sugar. But it is also true that honey has much more sweetening power. This makes it so that you need far fewer honey to make your coffee taste sweet. In the end it seems that honey remains a good beneficial substitute for sugar but not because it contains fewer calories.

2)From all the meats you can consume fish is the less fatty choice:I don't know how it happened but countless people think that fish contain fewer fats than any other type of meat, including low fat meat like chicken meat. The truth is that 100 grams of turkey meat contains only 3 grams of fat while 100 grams of tuna contains 13 grams of fats. You ought to still eat fish even if it is fattier and contains extra calories because the fats it contains are good nourishing fats. Fish contain omega 3 fats which help you prevent cardiovascular diseases.

3)You get overweight because of fat: Salt isn't fattening if you consume it alone, but it leads to water retention. On average you are eating about 10 grams of salt every day but your body only needs only 4 grams of salt per day. Just 2 grams of the 10 come from the salt you personally add in your cooking. various foods you eat contain heaps of salt in them. You shouldn't stop eating salt and salty foods thinking that because of it you are gaining weight. Your body has its own mechanisms of defense. If you eat salty foods you feel the need to drink lots of water. All that water helps you get rid of the excess salt found in your body without making you fatter. So salt is nonfattening.

4) If you eat less food your tummy will get smaller in time:this dieting myth is as naive as untrue it is. You can starve yourself for 1 week and you won't get a smaller stomach. All you succeed in doing is starve your body which is always bad. Your stomach is a muscular and elastic container. Your stomach expands when your eat food and regains its initial size after the digestive process is over. Regardless of how much you starve yourself your stomach won't become smaller. But you will harm it because all that gastric acid will start eating your stomach and you will suffer form stomach problems in time. Plus hunger is very painful. So don't do it.

5) Frozen vegetables contain a smaller amount of vitamins and minerals than fresh vegetables: on the contrary. Frozen vegetables, because they are frozen quickly after they are harvested, suffer a smaller amount of vitamin and mineral losses. Fresh vegetables, which are kept for days in crates for days, get damaged and start to lose the vitamins and minerals they contain. If you have a garden and you have just picked the fruits and vegetables you are eating the situation is very different then.

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