This week I eat close to the source
I have a robust disdain for banana bread. Wrapped as it often is in rustic sandwich paper, all brown and chunky-looking, the stuff poses as an innocuously wholesome breakfast food. Banana. And bread. So breakfasty! But what a slippery sell-in. One slice of the stuff contains up to 2339kj. You have yours with butter? Hold onto your digestive juices for this: this tasty package comprises a whopping one-third of your recommended daily dietary intake and contains up to 44g of sugar. Or, to keep things tangible, 10 teaspoons.
Disdainful much?
Slippery sell-ins are the reason why we’re getting fat. We’re bludgeoned with competing diet tricks and plans. And food is confusing; it’s rarely what it says it is. The net result: we have no bloody idea what we’re meant to eat anymore. We have food fatigue. And so we eat banana bread.
It’s not that we don’t know the information – the most read item in the home is the back of a cereal box. And yet, how many of us know that those little-flakes-of-corn-consumed-at-breakfast, for instance, are drenched with more salt than potato chips. One pasta sauce I found in the back of my pantry contains more sugar than chocolate topping. And plain old orange juice…jamful with as much sugar as a can of Coke, about 10 teaspoons. True!
In my studies to become a health counselor I’ve weighed up more than 100 different diets. None work. The human condition is not made for restriction (we’re forward-moving beasts) and so our bodies rebel against diets at some point, in most cases putting on more weight than might have been lost (the evolutionary purpose of which might just be to teach us not to try such a stupid stunt again?).