OBC Food Rules-Day 34: Sweeten and Salt your Food Yourself

Whether soups or cereals or soft drinks, food and beverages that have been prepared by corporations contain higher fat levels of salt and sugar than any ordinary human being would ever add-even a child.  By sweetening and salting these foods yourself, you'll make them to your taste, and you will find you're consuming a fraction as much sugar and salt as you otherwise would.

Food Rules-Day 5: Avoid Foods that have Some Form of Sugar (or sweetener) Listed Among the Top 3 Ingredients

Labels list ingredients by weight, and any product that has more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar.  (For the exception to this rule, see rule 60, regarding special occasion foods.) Complicating matters is the fact that , thanks to food science, there are now some 40 types of sugar used in processed food, including barley malt, beet sugar, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetner, dextrin, dextrose, fructo-oligossaccharides, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, sucrose, invert sugar, polydextrose, turbinado sugar, and so on.  To repeat:  Sugar Is Sugar.  And organic sugar is sugar too.  As for noncaloric sweeteners such as aspartame or Splenda, research (in both humans and animals) suggests that switching to artificial sweeteners does not lead to weight loss, for reasons not well yet understood.  But it may be that deceiving the brain with the reward of sweetness stimulates a craving for even more sweetness.