MYTH: All calories are equal, it doesn’t matter which types of foods they are coming from.
Calories coming from alcohol, fats, carbs & protein are all very different. They all have different nutrients/ vitamins/ minerals & carry out different functions in your body.
Surely everybody knows that if your daily average cal count is between 1800-2400 cal a day – whether you consume them all from healthy meals on any given day or say junk food/ alcohol would not have the same effect on your body.
A) A healthy day of 3meals (porridge as breakfast, salad or soup for lunch & meat/fish with veg as dinner) & 2snacks (fruit/ berries/ nuts) between meals would also average out to 2000 calories a day,
B) Average bar of chocolate has about 180-220 calories so 10bars would equal 2000 cal,
C) An average drink has 250cal so if u have 8drinks totalling 2000calories.
How much energy you have, how good u feel, how nutritious your meals are, how much vit & minerals you get, and how fit/ strong/ lean you are from options A, B, C will all differ (obviously option A being by far the best one).
MYTH: Low fat foods are healthy because they are lower in calories & saturated fat.
This is incorrect. Naturally occurring fats that are unprocessed etc are good for you. So taking out natural fats (let’s say from greek yogurt) means you take out natural nutrients/ goodness out of it. Besides, once the fats are taken out the food gets fortified with one of the two remaining nutrients: protein or carbs (sugar). Protein is a more expensive & hard to fortify with nutrient, so in 99% of the times it will be the carbs, i.e. sugars that get added in to make up for the fats, which is a lot worse.
Fats aren’t bad for us, ESP if it’s the naturally occurring ones (the processed fats as well as the fats from junk food is what you want to avoid instead).
Low fat food labels usually aren’t as good as they might sound to be (of course, lean meat, fruit, veg etc are all good, but these are not low fat food versions) & we all need good healthy fats in our daily diet.