The 7 most caloric and useless foods that are preventing you from creating the perfect body

general practitioner, ex-director of the Hillel Foundation in Saratov

Many of our most familiar dishes and drinks contain empty calories with little or no nutritional value. A diet with a large amount of such foods can lead to weight gain and lack of important substances: vitamins, minerals, protein, essential fatty acids, and fiber necessary for normal digestion.

There are basically two main categories of foods with empty calories in our diet:

• Those with high amounts of sugar or other sweeteners in their composition;
• With high fat and oil content.

Sweetened beverages

Lemonades, sports and fruit smoothies, juices. Be sure to check the compositions of drinks for added sugar. Especially insidious in this case it is juices, which seem to us more useful due to their naturalness.

Ready-made coffee and tea drinks (hot or cold)

For example, coffee, which can be found on the shelf in the supermarket. Such drinks are loaded with sugar: one can contains about 190 kcal or almost 8 tsp of sugar.

Snacks

Pastries and breakfast bars/grain bars/toast bread (the kind that can keep for weeks and stay fresh), granola bars and breakfast bars fall into this category.

Granola also likes to pretend to be a healthy food with fiber, but in reality we eat almost pure sugar – one granola bar can contain about 200 kcal or almost 5 tsp of sugar.

Sweetened breakfast cereals or instant porridge

Check labels before buying cereal that is made by simply adding boiling water.

A bag of instant oatmeal contains about 150 kcal or about 4 tsp of sugar.

Sugar is usually second in the composition (and the composition is ranked from higher content in the product to lower).

Condiments

Mayonnaise, ketchup, and soy sauce can slip you a lot of empty calories. Mayonnaise tops this list because not only is it high in fat, but it often has added sugar in it.

Many people add about 2 tbsp. of mayonnaise or sauces based on it to a sandwich. And that’s about 198 kcal and 22 g of fat – one sauce would be enough for a separate snack in terms of calories.

Chips and popcorn to cook in the microwave

A 120g bag of potato chips contains about 303 kcal and 20g of fat. A pack of popcorn contains 435 kcal and 25 g of fat.

At the same time, the potatoes and corn that go into the preparation of these popular snacks have nutritional value.

Frozen convenience foods

Walk around the frozen food department and you’ll find dozens of packaged meals just waiting for you to make them already: puffs, pizzas, dumplings, and the like.

The problem is that they’re full of partially hydrogenated fats and oils. Just one package of pepperoni pizza from the freezer contains about 510 kcal and 26 g of fat. Beware of such products.