Think it’s good for your diet to “blow up” over a salad? Do you give up carbohydrates and believe it’ll help you lose weight? Better think again.

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10 myths that might harm your health, to set things straight once and for all.

  1.  Healthy food won’t make you fat
    This is undoubtedly the most common myth. If all you eat all day is honey, dates, rice, whole bread and tahini – you’ll gain weight.
    10 Diet Myths that Might Harm your Health

    Excessive eating of foods rich in carbohydrates, even complex and healthy ones, will eventually be stored in our body as fat, and will increase the blood fats (triglycerides).

2.  No eating after 6pm
It might be true, if you go to sleep at 8:30pm. Hunger makes us stressful and can cause  sleeping problems. However, food can help us get a calm sleep. That being said, it is advised not to burden the stomach with a “heavy” dinner, but it is quite welcoming to have a small snack to help us relax and fall asleep. A good example of something to eat before you go to sleep can be oatmeal that helps the body create the serotonin hormone, known for its relaxing activity.

3.  It’s better to blow up over a salad – it’s healthier
So it might be better to blow up over a salad rather than to over-eat French fries, but it is best not to overeat at all. It takes the body approximately 20 minutes until it sends the brain a message saying that you feel full, so it is better to eat slowly and stop eating when you begin to feel full. This way helps the digestive system, which in turn, becomes available to digest more optimally. Otherwise you’ll “gain” a stomach ache, a sense of heaviness, and a tired sensation and digestive problems.

4. It’s better to eat dairy products that have between 0%-1.5% fat percentages
Absolutely not. In order for the calcium to absorb, vitamin D needs to be present. Since vitamin D is fat soluble, too little fat (anything under 3%) means the product won’t contain the vitamin. This means that the calcium won’t be absorbed. So if you’re eating dairy, make sure to buy those with 3%-5% fat and stay away from low fat dairy products.

5.  I eat a lot of meat, there’s no way I have low B12 levels
This important vitamin is found in many animal products, yet more and more people seem to develop deficiency for it. And they’re not all vegans: it isn’t rare to find sworn carnivores that developed such deficiencies. These people are apparently suffering from absorption problems that can be caused due to several reasons:

  • Insufficient and not enough chewing of the meat being eaten. In order to maximize the absorption of the vitamins and minerals, the food needs to be chewed until it turns into mush in our mouth, and only then can you swallow it.
  • A lack of an intrinsic factor: can be found in the stomach and leads the vitamin to the bowel, where it would be absorbed.
  • Alcohol consumption can also harm the vitamins being absorbed.
  • Inflammatory bowel disease, gastric surgery all can harm the absorption.
  • Helicobacter pylori infection lowers the acidity of the stomach.
  • Medications, especially antacid drugs that lower the stomach’s acidity can hurt the digestion and the breaking down and absorption of the food.

6.  Breakfast only makes you hungrier and leads to gaining weight
The opposite is true. After a night’s fast the body needs food in order to replenish its glycogen levels – the sugar stored in the liver and muscles. If we don’t have something small to eat, preferably sourced in a carbohydrate, the body would think it’s fasting, and will start breaking down protein (muscle) to create available energy. The muscle is an active tissue that burns weight even while we’re sleeping (!), which means that if we skip breakfast we’ll lower the body’s fat burning rate, instead of improving it, and that might cause us to gain weight.

7.  A no-carb-diet is recommended for anyone who wants to lose weight fast
Yes and no. A no (or better known as a low)-carb diet will indeed cause  fast weight –loss, but is problematic due to several reasons. First off, it isn’t suited for anyone, since it can create strain on the kidneys and can even cause long-term kidney problems. Also, people who participate in such a diet will experience fast weight loss, but they’re actually only losing muscle mass, which can cause their metabolism to slow down and their weight to bounce back and bring along some extra pounds.

8.  If I’ll gain weight I can always lose the extra pounds

You can indeed always lose the excess weight, but the problem with gaining weight is the new fat cells that form where the fat is stored. When losing weight those cells empty out, but don’t go away, and the body strives to fill them back up. This means that from now on you’ll have to make an extra effort to maintain a balanced weight. So isn’t it better to maintain it to begin with?

9.  Children can eat anything without thinking about their health
Absolutely not! Healthy nutrition education should start from an early age. Studies have shown that the chances of an obese  child to become an obese adult are very high. Also, nowadays there’s been a noticeable decrease in the ages for diseases formerly known to be related to adults like hypertension, high blood fats and type 2 diabetes, and it’s not very rare to find teenagers with such diseases. Children, like adults, should maintain a healthy diet that includes all the nutrients, a daily consumption of fruits and vegetables, drinking plenty of water and downsizing the amounts of junk-food and candy.

10. If my friend went on a diet and was successful – so will I
Not necessarily. The market has tens if not thousands of diets and nutrition methods. Some are very similar and some very distinct, and might contradict each other. What’s nice though is the fact that there isn’t one right method of nutrition, like there isn’t one type of person. We differ from each other in many ways, in our metabolism, our genetics, our weight gaining tendencies, our allergies and of course in our daily schedules and preferences.

A proper diet needs to be customized to our personal needs. A no-carb-diet won’t work for a person who can’t imagine their life without bread in the long-haul. Since proper nutrition isn’t just another diet, but should become a way of life, it’s best to choose a diet that you can stick to for a long time, and even enjoy.

Learn why the Trim Down Club is a balanced eating plan that really works for long-term weight loss.

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Comments 8

  1. Hi, whyme. If you take them before bed, this is (hopefully) after your stomach has emptied following your last food intake, which minimizes the difficulties. The nutrients most affected tend to be vitamins D and B12 – vitamin D is something that most people are recommended to take as supplements anyway, and B12 can be taken as a sublingual lozenge, which bypasses the stomach enters the bloodstream more easily (the best B12 form is methylcobalamin).

  2. My husband and I are both on antacids to be taken at bedtime due to the reflux causing deterioration of the esophagus. You say that taking these will harm the breakdown and absorbsion of foods. How do we win?

  3. I work and only get an hour for lunch. Most everything I have head in the past and reading what your site says is eat 6 small meals a day. I can’t do that so how can I work a program that is going to help me lose my weight?

  4. Hi, jballthomp. When your blood sugar is 128 at 8:20 pm, what is it during the night and the next morning? That is a critical part of the equation, and hopefully something you check on with your healthcare provider. In general, good sources of omega-3 fatty acids and fiber like chia are considered beneficial for diabetics.

  5. I started a Chia smoothie routine today before I signed on with you tonight and my blood sugar is now 128 at 8:20 pm. Am I at risk of doing this? I am an uncontrolled insulin resistant type 2 diabetic. I had a stroke last year (5/23/12) right after carroded artery surgery where a blood platelet broke off and traveled to the left side of my brain. I still have problems and am depressed and want to focus on getting better. I hope you can help me

    jballthomp

  6. #4 is actually true! Many nonfat milk brands are fortified with extra vitamin D, which is shown to improve bodily stores of vitamin D, and lower the incidence of rickets in the US (vitamin D deficiency). Calcium and vitamin D are absorbed throughout the small intestine using special transporters and cholemicrons, which come from the other fats in a balanced diet. Vitamin D helps the body increase calcium and phosphorus stores during the building of bone. Precursor Vitamin D is synthesized in our liver and activated in skin with UV light. Americans are not exposed to natural light on a daily basis and thus have high rates of vitamin D deficiency. Milk fortifiers and supplemental vitamins help rectify this. Skim milk is shown to be healthier for the heart and endocrine system. Even though orange juice is not nutritious in the context of its high sugar content, it can even be fortified with vitamin D having no fat at all and still be effective. See the results section from the scientific paper below that skim or non fat milk is just as effective at delivering Vitamin D.

    http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/77/6/1478.short

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