It’s That First Bite That Will Do You In

Staying away from sweet treats and fried foods may be the best strategy to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

You’ve been eating healthy and avoiding junk food.

There is a kind of momentum which develops where you are gaining will power by exercising your will to stay away from fatty, sugary foods.

But, that first whiff leads to that first bite which can lead to a slippery slope into over indulgence.

There’s a reason this tends to happen almost exclusively with fatty and sugary foods and not, say, lettuce. The saturated fats in foods like bacon and cheese impair your brain’s normal ability to regulate appetite and cravings, so you don’t realize you’re full until you’re completely stuffed, says Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., a health psychologist at Stanford University and author of The Willpower Instinct. What’s more, that effect on your appetite can last for up to three days, the length of time it takes to flush those fats from your system. So one unhealthy indulgence can end up triggering a major relapse.
Add sugar to the fatty food, ice cream, cake, doughnuts, and you have a double whammy. High-sugar foods increase your levels of ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite and increases cravings. “So you may tell yourself ‘Just one bite’ but find yourself wanting more and more, the more you eat,” says McGonigal.

Moderation is a term that gets tossed around often, however, the definition seems to have a wide range of meaning.

If being around treats could derail your diet, then better to avoid them altogether especially considering that there is no nutritional gain to be had from eating junk food anyway.

Fried Foods May Not Lead to Heart Disease

Fried foods are not the villains of nutrition that they have been made out to be in the past.

Spanish researchers have found that eating foods fried in healthier oils such as olive or sunflower is not linked to heart disease or premature death.

“We should emphasize that our results were obtained within the context of a healthy diet, the Mediterranean one, and may not be replicated with other types of diets,” researcher Pilar Guallar-Castillon, MD, PhD, MPH, associate professor of preventive medicine at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, tells WebMD.

Another big difference between Spanish diners and U.S. diners may also play a role. “In our study, most meals were prepared and consumed at home,” Guallar-Castillon says. It’s difficult to know which type of oil you are eating, she says, when you are dining out.

There is agreement that this is not a green light to indulge in high fat foods as a regular part of your diet.

In an editorial that accompanies the study, Michael Leitzmann, MD, of the University of Regensburg in Germany, notes that the body of evidence refutes the myth that frying food is generally bad for the heart. “However,” he writes, “this does not mean that frequent meals of fish and chips will have no health consequences.”

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