What Are the Most Fattening Foods
If you are thinking of leading a healthy life without implementing a strict diet you need to know that there are a number of foods that are more fattening than others. It is important that, before plan your new eating habits, you are aware of what you can include in your diet and what is best left aside once and for all so to avoid putting one extra kilos.
In OneHowTo we want to help by informing you what are the most fattening foods and also discover which foods are most recommended to lead a healthy lifestyle. Discover them!
Fast foods and ready meals
Going to fast food restaurants or eating supermarket ready meals are habits you must abandon definitively. Why? Firstly, because food from fast food restaurants includes high calorie and low nutrient ingredients; in addition, the chemicals contained (such as flavor enhancers, preservatives, etc) further add to the already high calorie count and offer no additional nutrition.
Supermarket ready meals are exactly the same: the ingredients which are used in production make their fat and calorie counts very high and offer few nutrients In short: by eating this type of food you are adding fats to your body and no nutritious elements.
One of the most fattening foods are French fries as they are a product made by dehydration and later oil absorption. This basic procedure to make chips means that this food has a large quantity of calories which then become refined carbohydrates and fats.
With the dehydration procedure potatoes loose their water through evaporation and consequently they absorb all the fats and oils when cooking. For this reason, if you want to enjoy a healthy and nutritious diet say goodbye to French fries and crisps as their preparation process is the same and, in addition, we must add extra additives for their preservation.
In general we must that any form of frying involves food absorbing high amounts of oil and fat. Therefore, a kind of food which may be considered healthy, such as chicken breast, when fried becomes a calorie bomb. Replace fried foods with healthier cooking methods such as a grill, oven baking or by vapour. You will notice the difference!
Another habit that we must abandon if we want to enjoy healthy and low calorie foods is that of eating sauces. When people say that pasta is fattening they are making a big mistake since pasta alone does not fatten: what makes it high in calories are the sauces with which we tend to accompany this staple food.
The same applies in the opposite sense: to think that a salad is not fattening because it is vegetable based is wrong. If you add yoghurt sauce the salad become high in calories. As you see, what is fattening are the sauces that accompany many foods as these are made with ingredients with that are high in calories (like liquid cream, abundant oil, fats, etc).
So if you want to eat without putting on weight avoid adding sauces to your dishes. Why not go for a splash of oil or a touch of lemon to liven your low calorie meals.
Sugary soft drinks
Soft drinks are another food that is very fattening because most of its components are sugars or caffeine. Take into account that if you want to lead a healthy lifestyle sugary soft drinks must become a thing of the past since they only provide calories and fats to your body with no positive nutrient, quite the opposite: we know that some soft drinks hurt the bones because they affect calcium absorption.
So forget sugary soft drinks as part of your diet and opt for other drinks which are more nutritious such as tea or vegetable juices.
Beef and pork, among others, are meats commonly known as red meat, a type of meat which has a high content of saturated fat and which leads to weight gain in people that eat it regularly. Rather than eating this type of meat try out lean meats such as chicken or turkey. These are tasty meats with a very low calorie content.
In this section we also include all kinds of cured and dry meats as well as sausages, foods that have had ingredients and preservatives added in their preparation, which have also raised their levels of saturated fats. Mediterranean cured sausages like chorizo or salame are ingredients to block from your diet if you want to lead a healthy lifestyle low in fats.
Patisserie and refined flour products
Patisserie and bakery products such as croissants are made with refined flour, one of the ingredients to avoid due to its high calorie count. Similarly we must include in this group biscuits and white breads, all of which are made with white flours which are refined and high in sugar.
However, we should forget the falsehood that bread is fattening as it is not. As with sauces, is not the bread that is fattening but what we put on it: dunked in a sauce, layered with a fatty or sugary spread, etc.
What is correct is that refined flour is made with sugars, something that increases its saturated fat content. Therefore we recommend that carbohydrates eaten be made with whole-wheat flour as their fibre and slow absorption will turn it to energy and not saturated fats.
Chocolate is an ingredient which alone has a high calorific content. Many people have argued that chocolate is not fattening, that what is fattening is the milk and sugars that are added, but in reality this is not the case: pure chocolate has many calories. It is true, however, that it has less calories than milk chocolate or white chocolate but pure chocolate still has a high calorie count.
Here is a calorie chart for 100 grams of chocolate, so you can get an idea about what we mean:
- White Chocolate: 566 kcal per 100 g
- Milk Chocolate: 534 kcal per 100 g
- Dark Chocolate: 520 kcal per 100 g
As you see, although the pure chocolate has less energy that that prepared with milk, chocolate has many calories and therefore is one of the more fattening foods.
Packaged fruit juice
Packed fruit juices are also a very fattening food because they contained a large quantity of sugars. Indeed, excessive consumption is linked to obesity, therefore, forget packaged juices and start to prepare your own or simply replace the beverage with a piece of fruit.
At OneHowTo we want to help by giving you juice recipes which are perfect to add to your diet.
Alcohol is another food that is very fattening because it contains large amounts of sugar in its preparation; spirits must be avoided above all as they contain more sugars. When drinking spirits, keep in mind that the degrees of the drink are representative of its alcohol content and so the higher the degrees the more fattening the drink is.
This article is merely informative, oneHOWTO does not have the authority to prescribe any medical treatments or create a diagnosis. We invite you to visit your doctor if you have any type of condition or pain.