Seven Health Foods That Can Ruin Your Diet

How to avoid being blindsided by weight gain

Even when you think you’re eating healthy, you may want to think again — there are some foods pretending to be healthier than they really are. Or they may be healthy in themselves, but only if you don’t overdo them.

These foods could be undermining your attempts to lose weight and eat healthy:

1. Smoothies: A swirl of hidden calories

There are few foods – calorie for calorie – as nutritionally packed as vegetables and fruits. But depending on the ingredients in your smoothie, including the amount of fruit, juice and protein, it can contain far more calories than you’d imagine, up to 1,500! Try this: Add fruit for flavor, but focus on veggies, and add some leafy greens in the mix – which are uber-low in calories but superheroes in health benefits. A few pineapple chunks can help make the baby spinach or kale in a smoothie easier to enjoy.

2. Granola and trail mix: Dense, power-packed

Granola has healthy properties – whole oats and grains – but it is often prepared with a lot of butter and oil. If it is sticky and clumped, that’s an indicator of an unhealthy recipe. There are also healthy granola recipes, but still, a serving is a very small amount. Granola contains a whopping 400 calories in an average cup. The same is true for nuts and dried fruit, which are also calorie-dense. A single cup of almonds contains more than 500 calories. A little bit goes a long way.

3. Bagels: Carbohydrate ‘crash cart’

Most bagels contain three or four servings of carbohydrates and if you add cream cheese, it can have more than 400 calories and contain a whopping 25 percent of the daily allowance of sodium. If you compare a plain bagel and a simple glazed donut, they have about the same number of calories, 215 and 229 respectively. Donuts are hardly a health food and certainly contain more sugar than bagels, but bagels can sometimes go under the radar as a good, regular breakfast option.

4. Soup and salad: Mischievous match

Soup and salad can make a healthy meal. But the devil is in the details: Cream-based soups can be quite high in fat, and when it comes to a salad, once you add croutons, cured meats, and high-fat dressing, it’s no longer a low-calorie meal. The other, less obvious issue with soups at restaurants is that they are notoriously high in sodium. Too much salt doesn’t just raise blood pressure, but it also increases your risk of stroke, heart failure, osteoporosis, stomach cancer and kidney disease.

5. Fat-free foods: Good bye fat, hello sugar

Some fat-free foods really are healthier, like cheese and other dairy products made with skim rather than whole milk. But usually, manufacturers of fat-free foods add sugar or high-fructose corn syrup to help the foods stay shelf-stable, and this adds empty calories. People tend to have a phobia of fat, but healthy fats are essential to our diet — as long you eat fats in moderation. Choose monounsaturated fats, like those in nuts or fish.

6. Meatless ‘burgers’: What are you?

If you’re eating a processed meatless “burger” or “hot dog,” consider what has been used as a protein source. Sometimes these products have a lot of added chemicals. People can actually gain weight on a meatless diet from eating the wrong types of proteins. What should you look for? A smaller ingredient list. The more ingredients you actually recognize, the better that food is.

7. 100-calorie snack packs: DIY is better

Single-serving snack packs are helpful for people who have trouble with portion control, but these snacks are not a good source of calories. Choose a banana or a container of Greek yogurt instead, or make your own serving-sized baggies of nuts. You’ll avoid the blood sugar spike and drop that you’d get from eating a 100-calorie pack of packaged mini cookies.

Tip: Eat healthy foods 75 percent of the time

The key to healthy eating isn’t just the choice of foods themselves, but also moderation. Remember also that it’s OK to indulge once in a while if you generally eat right. My advice: Try to eat healthy foods 75 percent of the time, rather than it being all or nothing.

— Laura Jeffers, MEd, RD, LD Cleveland Clinic.org