As a personal trainer and nutrition enthusiast in Swansea I have become increasingly aware, and worries about ‘fake’ foods. The aim of this article is not to swamp you with the quite worrying information I have learnt with regards to some foods, but just to give you a brief overview on these fake foods and why it’s best to give them to stay away.
Processed foods make up a large amount of the toxins we consume every day, if you see a food with ingredients you can’t pronounce then I would recommend you just put it back. This is the reason why I am such a big advocator of untouched organic food.
Sadly our supermarkets are full of ‘fake foods’.
The main purpose of fake foods is to compete against the more expensive real products. Many people are drawn in by the cheap price rather than what is actually contained in these cheap products. Margarine is made up from hydrogenated oils and was introduced as a cheaper alternate to butter. These fake foods are mare primarily of different chemicals and sometimes contain gums and sugar fillers. The different types of fake foods on the markets include microwaveable snacks, ketchup, hydrogenated oils, margarine, ketchup and sadly many more.
I read a very good and quite worrying comment:
“It is a dangerous experiment that humans are living on processed, junk, and invented foods that have never before existed as part of our food chain.” – Jesse Hanley.
I feel as if this comment is a fair reflection on society; we were not put on this earth to eat these types of ‘foods’. It is just over time most people have become lazier in their nature and the quick fix, cheap option seems to be most popular.
Apologies to the hot dog lovers, for the up and coming bit of information which I read about the production of hot dogs.
Hot dogs are created through the mechanical separation process of pork or chicken scraps which are still attached to the bones. So what you will bite into is not really meat, its bits of tendon, muscle fibre and other unsavoury parts of a pig or chicken. The worst thing about it is the bits of meat I just mentioned are actually the most natural food product contained in a hot dog.
Hydrogenated fats are also something to be very wary of. Hydrogenated fats came about by injecting hydrogen into vegetable fats when under a high amount of pressure and heat. This chemical configuration is not found in nature, the result is to prolong shelf life of certain products. Let’s be honest, none of us want our food created this way. Trans fats (the bad fats) are actually banned in Denmark, and should be avoided at all costs. Did you know that if a product contains less than 0.5g of trans fats then it can be advertised on the pack as containing zero trans fats!
The best thing I would recommend is to be a lot more interested in the back of the packets rather than the price on the front. Have a quick look at the ingredient list and most of you should be able to tell pretty soon whether it is a good product or not. The aim of this post was just to quickly warn you about the fake foods on the market that there are today.
Thanks for reading,
Richard
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