You should really try and avoid eating these foods. They are all man-made, artifical and, in my opinion, I could eat as much, if not more, of natural products like butter, sugar and oils and still lose weight than I think I could have done by eat Hydrogenated Fat and Aspartame.
I recommend The Little Food Book: An Explosive Account of the Food We Eat Today (Alastair Sawday's Fragile Earth)
as the ultimate easy-to-read help to getting you to really think about what you are eating.
Bad Foods
Hydrogenated Fat
A factory-produced form of fat made by modifying natural vegetable oils we would consider healthy and be encouraged to eat. Apparently it improves the shelf-life of foods (Seems even bacteria won't eat it!), and makes the foods cheaper to manufacture.
Studies have linked it with heart disease, cancer and obesity (it's harder to shift from your body), among other things.
MonoSodiumGlutamate (MSG)
Added to foods to enhance the flavour. Historically common in Chinese restaurants, but once you start checking your food labels you'll find it in quite a lot of things.
Studies have linked it with heart attacks and brain damage amongst others. Common in flavoured crisps, which really gets you wondering what damage it could be doing to young children.
There are limits on how much you are supposed to eat daily, interestingly enough and it makes you wonder how poor some food must really taste that they have to chuck this in on top.
By the way, on some food labels it's marked as "Hydrolised Vegetable Protein" or "E621" so don't be fooled.
Aspartame
A completely manufactured drug which influences your brain into thinking you are eating something sweet. Just in case you're not sure what I mean, it is a drug affecting your brain rather than a food item with a taste! Apparently in the USA, when first introduced it was pushed through as a food additive and therefore avoided clinical trials as a drug.
Studies have linked it with brain damage and deaths amongst children. As a recent addition to the food world is hard to know the long term affects on adults are.
Another thing I found is that because it affects your brain rather than satisfies your sugar craving, you still fancy some sugar and end up eating something else later on to compensate.
It is commonly found in diet drinks, and the other advantage for manufacturers and retailers is that it costs a fraction of the price of sugar. You are probably better off drinking the full-sugar versions, since the health effects of sugar have been tested over the centuries.
The worst product I have ever seen in my entire life was a certain brand of crisps that somehow managed to contain all 3 of the above items!
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