Nutrition Videos

Hi! I'm Stelios Pantazis. I'm a doctor and I specialize in medical nutrition and metabolic disorders. Today, I'd like to warn you about some foods that are promoted as healthy or diet foods, while in no case should they be included in your diet. Let's see them. Toast bread. Toast bread is one of the foods that I almost always see in diets on the internet or that are unfortunately recommended even by diet experts, and I believe that it shouldn't be included in any diet. There are many reasons for that. First, the flour that is used is from soft wheat, which is often imported from Ukraine, the big granary of Europe, which is close to many factories as well as Chernobyl. It often contains added fats, which are rich in trans-fatty acids, which are very harmful for our heart and vessels. Sweeteners, conservatives, emulsifiers, added chemicals, flavour and texture enhancers, all these things that we wouldn't use to make bread at home. When you want to improve your diet, the bread toast can have no place in it. Charcuterie. Just as important as the extremely harmful toast bread is the charcuterie, which I often see in diets. I can't understand how cooked turkey or ham are considered healthy. I'm afraid that some diet experts have contributed to this too, because they systematically recommend it in the diets they propose. The World Health Organisation has long classified charcuterie, such as cooked turkey and ham, as cancerogenic foods. The same category includes smoking. For safety reasons, it has been specified that an adult person is allowed to consume up to 100 g of charcuterie per week. This amount corresponds to three slices of cooked turkey or ham. However, I believe that a person that wants to protect their health shouldn't consume the foods that the World Health Organisation considers cancerogenic at all. Sugar-free soft drinks. When it became widely accepted that sugar is very unhealthy, the food industry responded by creating a series of substances with sweet taste, like sugar, which contain few or no calories, unlike sugar. These substances are mostly chemical products, although some of them are natural. However, studies have shown that replacing soft drinks containing sugar with sugar-free soft drinks offers no significant benefit to our health. I don't want you to think that I consider sugar-free soft drinks as harmful as soft drinks containing sugar. Obviously, soft drinks containing sugar are worse. But sugar-free soft drinks are very harmful too and they don't belong to the diet of a person trying to lose weight or just follow a healthy diet. Fructose. Fructose was introduced to the market as an alternative to sugar. Although it has the same amount of calories, it can be used in smaller amounts, because it's sweeter. In fact, mainly in the past, but unfortunately even today, it was recommended by many experts to diabetics as an alternative to sugar. Nothing can be more wrong than this. Fructose has a low glycemic index, which means that it increases blood sugar much more slowly than sugar. But, unfortunately, the only organ that can store it is the kidney. As the kidney is loaded with fructose more quickly than it can get rid of it, the result is increased risk of kidney fat and insulin resistance. Both of these increase the risk of diabetes or the risk of deterioration for people that are already diabetics. Essentially, it worsens the problem that it tried to solve in the beginning. Stay away from it. Margarine. Margarine was developed as a cheap, low-quality alternative to butter. For many years, in the European countries, butter was one of the most common foods, but, unfortunately, it was expensive and relatively unaffordable for many families. However, some inventive chemists realised that they can make something that seems like butter from cheap seed oils, at very low cost. Unfortunately, the product was white, while butter is yellow. The solution was simple. To add yellow colour, in order to make it yellow, as consumers want. Of course, in advertisements, it couldn't be promoted as a cheap alternative to butter, but as a healthy alternative, which is not true. Butter is surely not the healthiest food that you can consume, but margarines are very rich in trans-fatty acids, which are the worst fats that you can consume, because they not only increase bad cholesterol, but they also decrease the good one, which makes them twice as harmful. But what about the advertisements saying that some margarines decrease cholesterol, because they contain some extra substances? These margarines do decrease cholesterol, but only when they replace common margarine. In plain words, if someone says "I'll eat margarine, no matter what you say, but please tell me which margarine is the least harmful for my health," then the margarines that decrease cholesterol are the best choice. On the other hand, as a dietary option, it's much worse than olive oil, which is the best in this category. If you want something like butter, you can use tahini or peanut butter, which are very affordable. If you can afford it, you can use other plant-based butters, such as butter from almond, hazelnut, pistachio etc. In no case should you use margarine, neither the one that decreases cholesterol nor the one that doesn't. Burgers with no meat. Another success of the food industry was the production of meat, usually in the form of burgers, with no meat. The big advantage of these burgers is that they're much better for the environment than meat burgers, but I'm not sure if they're better for your health. I'm afraid that they're worse. It's too early to say if these products should be included in our diet or not, or at what amounts, but I can surely tell you that you'd better avoid them, until we're certain that they're safe. Moreover, their cost is annoyingly high, because it exceeds 20 euro/kg. With the same money, you can buy the best organic meat, which is incomparably better than these substitutes. Plant-based cheese and cheese substitutes. Some really inventive people at the marketing department of some companies producing industrialised foods had a great idea. As many people believe that cheese is unhealthy and plant-based foods are healthy, let's make something from plant-based food that looks and tastes like cheese. In this way, they could present it as a healthy alternative to cheese. This was a great idea for the economic development of this food industry, but, unfortunately, it wasn't a great idea for our health. Plant-based cheese is produced from cheap, plant-based raw materials, mainly seed oils and potato starch, and not only is its taste very inferior to common cheese, but also its dietary value is much lower than common cheese. And I'm saying this believing, as I've repeatedly said on my channel, that cheese doesn't offer many benefits to our health. Plant-based cheese is much worse. Whether you do it for religious fasting or because you're vegan or because you believe that these products are better than common cheese in any way, please, stop eating them and look for better and healthier alternatives. Plant-based cheese and cheese substitutes are some of the worst things you could eat. These are some of the foods that are considered healthy by many people, but they're the exact opposite. You should try to avoid them as much as you can. Ideally, you should never consume them. If you thought this was interesting, please give us a thumbs up. 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