Common Diet Myths Busted

George Washington cut down a cherry tree and then admitted it when questioned rather than tell a lie. Just 300 Spartans held off the entire Persian army at Thermopylae. Christopher Columbus discovered America. Marie Antoinette once said, “Let them eat cake.” when asked what the starving French peasants could eat. Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to circumnavigate the globe. President Nixon was impeached from office. These are all common myths that many people accept as fact and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

There are also a large number of dieting myths that are accepted as fact for whatever reason and they’ve been accepted long before the existence of social media. Below are just a few. Adjust your diet accordingly.

• Late night binge eating puts on weight. It CAN put on weight if you binge on chocolate cake covered with chocolate ice cream after a day of doing no physical activity on a  daily basis. If you consume more calories than you burn, you’re going to add weight no matter what time of the day you eat. One thing that late-night eating does cause for many people is bedtime indigestion as your body works to digest that food while you’re trying to fall asleep.
• The less fat you eat, the better. This is simply not true. Our bodies require food from three large, generalized categories: proteins, carbohydrates and fats, yes, fats. But the “good” fats, not the bad. Fats can be separated into three categories: trans, saturated and unsaturated. The worst for us, health wise, is trans-fat which generally shows up in fried foods and some processed baked goods and snacks. While saturated fats do raise cholesterol, they are not as unhealthy as trans-fat. Saturated fats can be found in whole dairy products and fatty cuts of meat, such as bacon and sausage. Unsaturated fats are actually good for us and are found in nuts, avocados, salmon, and seeds.
• Sea salt is not as unhealthy as table salt but too much salt, no matter the source, is not good for us. The only differences between sea salt and table salt are in the taste, texture, processing and source. Regardless, an excessive amount of salt will raise your blood pressure no matter how it tastes or where it comes from.
• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast, as a meal, is no more important than lunch or dinner. It’s more about what you eat and in what quantity, rather than when you eat it. In fact, as more research is done on intermittent fasting, the more we are finding that it can be beneficial to skip breakfast every so often. Intermittent fasting is the practice of going longer than normal between meals, sometimes 16 hours or more and one way to accomplish this is to skip breakfast after eating dinner at 7:00 PM or so the night before and not eating again until lunch. This causes the body to turn to stored fat as a source of energy.
• You must be skinny to be healthy. Although obesity can cause health related conditions, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, there are plenty of overweight people (according to the BMI chart) who are quite healthy. What is most important for overall health is eating a nutritious and varied diet while maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
• You need an intense exercise regime in order to lose weight. Yes, if you exercise endlessly, you’ll burn more calories and lose weight, but one isn’t necessary to achieve the other. Conversely, being totally sedentary, day-after-day, will eventually cause health related issues. There must be some middle ground, and there is. Simply walking 30 minutes per day, working in the garden, daily yoga, or dancing can provide numerous health benefits. The key is to do so more days of the week than not and to eat a healthy diet. Save the marathon training for marathoners.

Before you buy into a diet trend or fad, do your research to ensure that it is not some myth that has spread like wildfire across social media. We tend to believe things that we hear over and over again, and that’s how myths become accepted as fact.