Snacks vs. Treats

I see commercials that offend my sensibilities very often nowadays. I get offended when a spokesperson tells me that a drug, along with a sensible diet, will help me shed pounds faster. How about instead I just use the sensible diet, start exercising like I should have been my whole life, and take my own sweet time losing the weight so that I can really understand what it takes to keep the pounds off and eat healthy. I get offended when cereal companies tell me that sugar-frosted-carbohydrate-bombs can be "part of a nutritious breakfast," because they can't. Denatured, extruded grain sludge mixed with three different kinds of sugar can not be part of anything nutritious, especially not breakfast. A healthy breakfast is a piece of fruit or some berries, a cup of all-natural yogurt and a handful of nuts or an egg. A bowl of sugary cereal and a glass of orange juice is the stuff that insulin spikes and crashes are made of. No wonder everyone is out getting a giant coffee to get through the morning and an "energy drink" for the afternoon. But the other day I saw a commercial that really got me mad. A cereal company thinks that it is a good idea for you to eat cereal as a snack during the work day. Now, if you are eating healthy, truly healthy, you may need snacks during the day. Again, your snacks should be nuts, fresh or dried fruits, yogurt (all natural here, please), cottage cheese, a small snack of lunch meat and hard cheese, fresh snap peas… things like that. Anything, and I mean anything, that has sugar as one of its first four ingredients is a treat, not a snack. This includes 99% of all "granola" bars, by the way. If you're eating granola bars thinking that they are a good, healthy snack, you should just go ahead and opt for the Snickers and at least not be fooling yourself. If your "trail mix" has chocolate in it, it's a treat. If your cereal has the word "frosted" in the name, it's a treat. I don't care if it is "all natural," "organic," "healthy," or "fat free," it's a treat.

Now, before you get mad at yourself, or, worse yet, at me, I think we shouldn't blame ourselves too much for succumbing to years of hard marketing. After all, many of these packages have the word "snack" printed right on them! But it's time to stop believing everything you read, call a spade a spade, and realize that most of what Americans ingest today is essentially a dessert. Some form of sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup (heaven forbid), fructose, brown sugar, brown rice syrup, lactose… is in every packaged and prepared good you can find in the grocery store. Sugars have invaded most of our breads and lunch meats making even your lunch sandwich into a dessert. Now, I hear some of you saying, "But fruits have lots of sugar!" Yes, those marketers want you to think that a granola bar and a peach are interchangeable. Let me tell you why they are not, hopefully without boring you too much.

Most fruit and vegetable sugar is glucose, a monosaccharide or simple carbohydrate with a single-sugar molecular structure. Single-sugar molecules do not need to be further digested, and are readily absorbed as a nutrient. Glucose is, of course, the main energy source for your rain when you are eating carbohydrates (your brain can also use ketones when you are starving, on the
Atkin's Diet, or use coconut as your main sugar source as in some remote areas). Disaccharides and polysaccharides are complex carbohydrates, and they need to be broken down by enzymes in your intestines in order to be available as an energy nutrient. These include table sugar made from beet or cane, starches like grains and grain flours, and other natural sugars like the lactose in milk products.

So taking the peach as an example, very little of the peach is going to end up as body fat or waste. Unfortunately, the FDA does not currently require companies to distinguish between simple and complex carbohydrates, but from a nutritional facts website (here's a good one http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/1990/2), I found that, aside from the 17.3 grams of carbs, which again are mostly single-sugar, the peach has only about 70 calories, 0 fat, is full of Vitamin C, Vitamin A, phosphorus, potassium, fiber… Holy cow, you'd think you couldn't find a healthier food just looking at the nutritional info. Plus, it is as filling and a regular-sized muffin, I'd say. Let's look at the muffin, shall we? Let's ignore the obviously ridiculous Cranberry-Orange favorite from your local coffee house that has 410 calories, 53 grams of mostly complex carbs, and 20 grams of fat, and use an average, plain muffin made with 2% milk. Calories, 169, carbs, 23.6 grams (here, mostly complex carbs), fat, 6.5 grams. There is some nutrition in this one, for sure, but a lot of it is locked up in the stuff that is going to end up as waste, because, if you're having this as a "snack" you're body is already getting nutrition from other sources. Your body will, however, be inclined to store some of the excess nutrition as fat so you can get through lean times… like recessions. I wonder how many families switched from pizza to beans during the last few months… hmmmm, if only…??? Anyway, I know I didn't delve into the really biomechanical factors of why simple carbohydrates are better for you than complex carbohydrates, but you can research it further if you'd like. In the meantime, you should look at anything that has complex carbs in it as a treat, not a snack. So KISSS (Keep It Simple-Sugar, Stupid) your food, and enjoy better health.