Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Very important to read those nutrition labels


I think it is very important to read nutrition labels these days. Alot of the foods we eat now contain so many chemicals, food dyes, processed flour, refined sugars, and basically other ingredients that are not beneficial to your health. All these extra things that are added to the foods are basically added to increase the shelf life of them. This is why we need to stick to a healthy diet and concentrate on natural fresh healthy foods.

For example today I decided to have my whole wheat waffles with some strawberries for breakfast. Now you would think that is the perfect healthy breakfast. It has the whole grains and the fruit it is just perfect. As you can the see the product says nutri-grain and also that it is made with 8g of whole grain! Well boy was I wrong! By chance I decided to read the label because most of the whole wheat products I was seeing at the store had unbleached flour or enriched flour on their ingredients label. Now technically this does not make the product 100% whole wheat anymore! This product is now a refined or processed food.

The meaning of using enriched wheat flour is to increase the shelf life because waffle are found int he frozen section. So basically it is a chemical process that strips the wheat of its essential vitamins and minerals so it can last longer in the freezer. Now this causes the wheat to lose its most important nutrients and changes the whole process of its digestion in our system. Since it has become a refined or processed food it will digested very quickly in our system rather than the slowly complex digestion process that 100% whole wheat products should do. This is not healthy...if the product claims to be 100% whole wheat it should be 100% whole wheat....therefore I think I will have to start making my own homemade waffles from now on!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So the point of this post is to reinforce the fact that reading nutrition labels is very important especially if you are concentrating on eating healthy.

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