Food Rules #4

Rule 4: Avoid food products that contain high fructose corn syrup and foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) listed among the top three ingredients.  Here is some food for thought, when eating treats keep in mind to treat them as treats! As funny as that sounds in Pollan's book he covers sweets and how we abuse them in our diets. Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar. Complicating matters is the fact that, thanks to food science, there are now some forty types f sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetener, dextrin dextrose, fructo-oligosaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert sugar, polydextrose, sucrose, turbinado sugar and son. Sugar is sugar. And organic sugar is sugar too. Now having sugar isnt bad at all. It's when we abuse it is when it becomes unhealthy.  Treat treats as treats. If you reward yourself with something sweet then it is ok to have. But if your constantly indulging junk food then its just downright unhealthy. When looking at products that have high fructose corn syrup remember this. Its not that HFCS is any worse for you than regular sugar, but because it is, like many other unfamiliar ingredients in packaged foods, a reliable marker for a food product that has been highly processed.  As I'm looking at a box of poptarts, I notice that a top five ingredient is HFCS. Pop Tarts are my favorite and not bad for you, but having HFCS shows that this is a highly processed food that has a lot of things in it in order to keep it fresh for a long time. If we are aware of what we put in our bodies and we eat these foods in moderation then its not a problem, its when we have these all the time it then becomes health issue.