Foods You Should Never Eat Again

If you are what you eat, it’s easy to see how some foods should never, ever enter our bodies lest we become squares of bright yellow faux cheese (more on this below). Here are some of the food pyramid’s worst offenders, which are hereby listed as Healthy Living’s Most Wanted Food Criminals. They should be kept out of your kitchen at all costs.

1. Margarine is loaded with sodium and trans fats waiting to clog the arteries of innocent butter lovers everywhere. Trans fats increase cholesterol and risk of heart disease, so opt for real butter next time.

2. American cheese needs to get booted from the dairy drawer of your fridge pronto. It’s a mixture of milk fats, food coloring, whey protein and some solids and emulsifiers. Not only is it high in sodium, but it’s so high in fat that its nutrition stats are more similar to a high-fat meat than any dairy product. Please opt for a real cheese sans radioactive yellow dye next time, deal?

3. If you missed the news, one can of soda contains about 10 teaspoons of sugar. Over time, dumping that much sugar into your body can increase the risk of developing diabetes and even some forms of cancer. Beyond the sugar, the amount of caramel dye consumed in one can of dark soda daily has been linked to a 58 percent greater risk of cancer by a study published in the journal PLOS ONE.

4. Fast food and microwave popcorn both come in wrappers and bags coated in perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), meant to keep butter and grease from soaking through the materials. However, they also leach into food and, when consumed, can disrupt the endocrine system. The EPA calls them “likely carcinogens,” and they pose some serious risks, including cancer, infertility, thyroid disease, increased LDL cholesterol and immune system deficiency.

5. Check the labels on your processed meats like bacon, hot dogs and deli meats. They have been found to contain up to 400 percent more sodium and 50 percent more preservatives than unprocessed red meat. Some also contain nitrites and nitrates to enhance color and extend the expiration date, which have also been linked to cancer.

6. Other labels to proofread are the ones on your muffins and corn tortillas Propylparaben is used as a preservative in these foods and is also found in some lotions, but it can mimic estrogen in the body, potentially speeding up breast cancer cell growth and fiddling with your fertility.

7. We aren’t the first to decry artificial sweeteners, and we won’t be the last—it’s a hill worth dying on. Artificial sweeteners, like aspartame, stimulate appetite, increase cravings of carbs and cause greater weight gain and fat storage. Makes diet soda sound counterproductive, no? Aspartame also turns into methanol in the body, which is then broken down into formaldehyde. Needless to say it’s damaging, especially to DNA and other sensitive proteins. If you need a diet drink, try… anything else.

BY C�N�H�A MCF�R�A�D