The 5 Worst Foods For Health

By James Wagner, DC

These are the five worst items that are making us fat, sluggish, and prone to disease. It’s not the things that are bad-bad, like deep-fried cheesecake, because anyone with a slight inclination to watch what they eat will avoid that stuff on most occasions. But these things are what’s bringing us down the most. If these five things vanished, the health of our world would flourish greatly.

1. Breakfast Pastries

Some say breakfast is the most important meal, others say it’s best to skip it altogether, but we can all agree that dessert for breakfast is a bad way to start the day. The problem is that we often find ourselves on the run in the morning. Left to rely on the display case at the coffee shop, or the office break room, or a quick run through the hotel breakfast.

A 400 calorie muffin, donut, or bagel is not ridiculous in the calorie sense. Although for the health of your body, it leaves you feeling crummy, crashing shortly after, and little substance to carry to you on to the next meal.

2. The Snack Dish

The “snack dish” is the term for the bowl of salty or sugary stuff found lying around. It’s classically a combination of salt, peanuts, Chex cereal, and it seems like a sprinkle of cocaine, that comes out at holiday events. We call it “party trash,” but you may identify it as something like chocolate, nuts, or candy.

The snack dish isn’t food for nourishment, rather a quick hit of something delicious. Usually addictive to the point that you keep grabbing a “tiny” handful…until it’s all gone. Thus, be careful of food consumption to tickle the brain, rather than providing nourishment.

3. Restaurant Salads

I’m referring to the high-calorie faux salad used to get dressing into our mouths. The calorie content of restuarant salads often rivals the cheeseburger. The high cal salad is also a proxy for all things that masquerade as health foods, so throw things like smoothies, energy bars, and granola into number three as well.

It’s important to understand that regardless of the dressing’s affiliation to vegetable, natural, organic, vegan, keto, or whatever else, it can still contribute to poor health if consumed in excess.

Dress your salad as you would dress yourself for a day at the beach…keep it light.

4. Fries

Damage control on a “junk food” excursion, like burgers or chicken wings, could easily be navigated by subtracting the additional meal worth of calories served on the plate as fries. Like other foods on this list, they’re calorie dense, provide little nutritional value, and are easily consumed until the box is empty.

They seem to live on every list of side items, seducing you away from nutrient dense choices that could provide nutritional value with less calories.

5. Sugar Filled Drinks

We all know soda is bad, and we’ve caught onto the 900 calorie coffee drinks too. Consuming a bunch of sugar isn’t great altogether, but when taken in as food, at least, there is the digestion of other things in the food to slow down its processing. Sugary beverages, though, have a speedy transit time directly into the body. In other words, the single worst thing you can do is drink your sugar.