Sometimes the healthy choice is obvious. When you have to pick between chips and broccoli, for example. However, the right choice can become far less obvious when both options on the table seem to be healthy.
When your food comes from a shop rather than being home-made (then Instagrammed smugly), the amount of saturated fats, sugar and salt crammed in to make it taste oh-so-delicious can be surprising. Even when you’re trying to improve your diet and eat healthier foods it’s all too easy to put something in your basket that doesn’t really deserve the good-for-you label.
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To illustrate this, healthcare provider Benenden has created a quiz where you have to pick the healthier food from two options. There are no easy kale-vs-pizza match-ups – all the food involved has probably had the word “healthy” slapped on its packaging at one time. The key to dominating this quiz is to think of the potential downsides to the foods, especially when opting for shop-bought versions.
Here at Coach we’re always keen to help you make the very best nutritional choices, and that counts for quizzes just as much as in the real world, so we’d advise considering the following when you answer Benenden’s questions: the “unhealthy” saturated fat vs “healthy” unsaturated fat content, how much added sugar there is in to the food, the salt content, and how the food is processed or cooked. All those questions are worth asking whenever you pick food in the real, non-quiz world as well.
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It’s also worth reading through the explanations given for the answers rather than rage-quitting the page as soon as you get one wrong, because there’s some savvy nutritional advice included. And if your diet is crammed full of the less virtuous options from the quiz, don’t despair – all of these foods can be part of a healthy diet if you keep a careful eye on your overall intake of fat, sugar, salt and everything else.
Have at it.
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