Remember when many people were under the impression that any food labeled non-fat was healthy? The same thing seems to be happening with gluten-free foods.
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow famously touts this diet, but it’s important to remember that it isn’t as easy as just switching to gluten-free foods.
Avoiding gluten is essential whether or not you have an intolerance as gluten protein is not made for human consumption; however, just because a food is labeled “gluten-free,” doesn’t necessarily make it a better nutritional choice.
Cutting out gluten should also mean cutting down or eliminating processed foods. They should be replaced with healthy, nutritious foods like organic vegetables, fruits, grass fed meat and free-range poultry.
In addition to avoiding something that we just weren’t meant to eat, another one of the reasons people who eat a gluten-free diet lose weight or feel better is because they are cutting out those packaged goods like cookies, crackers and sweets and replacing them with fruits and vegetables.
If you replace foods that contain gluten with gluten-free pre-packaged and processed products on store shelves marketed to entice consumers to indulge in so-called healthy snacks you won’t be doing yourself any favors.
Those foods are typically made with refined grains, stripped of nutrients and do nothing positive for our health and could even result in gaining more pounds.
Here is a look at just two examples.
Kinnikinnick Foods Chocolate Dipped Donuts
Kinnikinnick Foods produces a line of foods labeled “gluten-free never tasted so good.”
Whether or not they’re tasty, they certainly aren’t healthy. The long ingredient list is as follows:
Icing (sugar, water, glucose, cocoa powder), sugar, rice white flour, tapioca starch, water, egg(s), rice flour sweet, shortening non hydrogenated (palm fruit or canola), fructooligosaccharides, yeast, peas protein, egg(s) whites, xanthan gum, fruit concentrates, salt, rice bran extract, cellulose, baking soda, glucono-delta-lactone, sodium bicarbonate, nutmeg.
Just one donut is packed with sugar found in the fruit concentrates; the artificial sweetener fructooligosaccharides are derived from fructose and should also be avoided. Yet another potentially harmful ingredient, canola oil, is a genetically modified product that can result in a host of negative health issues.
Tia’s Scrumptious & Totally Healthy Gluten-Free Grandma’s Chocolate Cake
The “totally healthy” label on this gluten-free dessert is extremely misleading and a prime example of deceptive advertising. It contains 33 percent more sugars than what is recommended for women to eat per day by the American Heart Association, 31 grams, all packed into one little cake.
Worst still, those sugars are derived from agave, a man-made sweetener that is basically just a highly processed sugar marketed to give the impression that it’s good for our health.
The next time you reach for that gluten-free product, make sure you aren’t falling for the label!
-The Alternative Daily
