Here is one small and valuable sensible tip to help you to get started if you would like to eat healthier. There are a lot of complicated diets to choose from and diet rules to follow. One very simple approach is to just “stop eating anything that contains bleached white flour.” If you do this it really cuts a lot of hassle out of deciding or knowing and trying how to eat healthy. You don’t need to think calories, or saturated fats, or portion sizes or about sugar or salt. Just stop the white flour.
Food products that list bleached white flour as a main ingredient usually contain many other unhealthy ingredients.
Another signal ingredient to watch for and eliminate is high fructose corn sweetener, which could be used in quality food products, but is probably a signal for junkier foods. You could instead target corn sweetener and corn syrup as foodstuff elimination, but cutting white flour is an easier path to follow, it will make a big difference and more perfectly, it’s easy to understand follow and you ordinarily don’t even need to read the package ingredients.
If a food product has a main ingredient of bleached white flour the next two ingredients are probably going to be high fructose corn sweetener and corn syrup. If you like playing this little healthy game of cutting out white flour then high fructose corn sweetener can be the next target.
If you are a cookie monster you are probably going to hate and reject this whole idea. So then, perhaps make cookies your one-and-only sin against the rule. Besides, there are some healthy cookies, just read the ingredients label. Sweet tooth lovers will also have to face cake and pie temptations. I don’t know if you will find it possible to give up white flour, but then just be careful about it.
The secret to success starts in the grocery store, if you don’t buy it in the first place, and it’s not handy at home, you’ll probably eat something else.
It’s a really simple concept, a single healthy diet rule with great results that just cuts out white flour.
You could approach it in a more complicated way by becoming gluten free, but you don’t need to get that complicated at first, just cut the bleached white flour. There are some exceptions like whole grain breads. Whole grain breads usually contain about half white flour, but it may be naturally white whole grain flour. It’s the white flour the yeast needs to raise the bread, and the gluten that holds the bread together. Some whole grain breads use xanthan gum instead of gluten and so that’s ok, or make your own flat breads from a variety of flours without bleached white flour.
Rejecting foods made with white flour is an easy, uncomplicated start to eat healthier by using only one shred of sense. Candy has sugar, ice cream has sugar and shorting, neither have white flour so they don’t get taken out of your diet necessarily unless that’s what you want to do. Just focus on white flour at first and let everything else stay in your diet. Sure you are going to eliminate a lot of stuff you like but think of all the stuff that doesn’t get cut out. The result is a lot of healthy eating, without cutting out other good stuff like ice cream and chocolate. You can find tons of other great stuff to eat without white flour.
There is a plentiful growing market of products for gluten free diets and celiac syndrome. It makes it much easier than ever before to live without wheat.
Try it, it doesn’t need to be a complete elimination or a lifetime commitment or a compulsive behavior, just look at a food choice and if it is made with white four make a choice to eat it or not. You don’t need to actually quit eating altogether forever or be compulsive about it, just make the choice more and more often.
You could try this same method with white rice, white potatoes, gluten, red meat or any other food that appears to you to be a questionable value, but there is no question about bleached white flour, if simply has no food value in it for you.
Do a search on ‘the truth about bleached white flour”. The results are phenomenal, lots of details and facts have been compiled for decades, and we still eat a lot of it. When you go out for a burger and fries, take at least half the bread off your plate, better to take it all off.
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