3 More Nutrition Blunders You Should Avoid

You might have the best intentions, but intentions, even the best of them, won’t help you get the right nutrition or lose weight. In a previous post on the Herbal One blog, we listed 3 Nutrition Blunders – habits in our diet that we might think are helping, but they’re really not.

At the end of that post, we promised you three more blunders. And here they are:

1. Ordering a Salad, with Dressing Added– Of course, tossed greens and the other vegetables you get in your lunchtime salad are very good for you. They contain lots of vitamins and fibre, and they have no fat.Even many salad dressings aren’t bad for you, especially when you have them in moderation.The Blunder: Letting the restaurant add the salad dressing. When you do, you’re likely to get too much dressing. It can actually make your salad more fattening than other supposedly less healthy dishes. Order your dressing on the side and dip your fork in it before stabbing your next bit of salad.
2. Eating Carb-free Meals to Stay Slim– Like with the other sources of energy in the food we eat, if we have too many carbohydrates, our bodies store the surplus energy as fat. Carb-free diets target all carbs in an effort to reduce the extra calories we get from them.But some carbs – complex carbohydrates – are full of micronutrients and our bodies take longer to digest them. This keeps us feeling fuller longer and reduces our hunger pangs.
   The Blunder: Eliminating all carbs. You’ll get almost as much weight reduction, and way more nutrition, by only reducing or eliminating foods that contain simple carbs; foods like white bread and white rice.
3. Using Margarine Instead of Butter– It’s one of the most commonly held truths about reducing fat in your diet – margarine has less fat than butter and therefore margarine is better for you. It’s true that butter has more fat than margarine, but what most people don’t realize is the hydrogenated vegetable oil in margarine is actually worse for your heart than the animal fat in butter.The Blunder: Using margarine with hydrogenated vegetable oil. The trans-fat in hydrogenated vegetable oil raises your LDL (bad) cholesterol and reduces your HDL (good) cholesterol. If you want to use margarine, look for margarines made with non-hydrogenated vegetable oil and no trans-fat.

You might be committing other nutritional blunders. The best way to know for sure is to contact a nutritional consultant who can review your diet to make sure you get the right nutrition while you manage your weight.