Ketchup is an innocent childhood food that conjures comforting memories. While it’s made mostly from tomatoes, popular ketchup brands like Heinz have strayed a long way from their whole food roots. Despite being one of America’s favorite condiments, ketchup is a highly processed food with little nutritional value.While no one thinks of ketchup as a health food, few people are aware that it can be downright harmful to health. Below are a few reasons to avoid commercial ketchup brands.
Pesticides in ketchup
Conventional tomatoes have pesticide residue. It’s very important to choose organic ketchup if you want to avoid these hormone-disrupting chemicals.
High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
High fructose corn syrup is one of the most common yet dangerous ingredients found in processed foods and the standard American diet.
Doctors like Mark Hyman and Peter Lustig say that consuming too much high fructose corn syrup could either kill you or make you sick. Dr. Lustig believes HFCS is a driving force behind the staggering rise of type two diabetes among children.
High fructose corn syrup has been linked to heart disease, obesity, cancer, dementia, liver failure, and tooth decay. And that’s in people who use it moderately. Not only does it spike insulin, but high fructose corn syrup is typically made from genetically modified corn.
High fructose corn syrup and regular corn syrup are the third and fourth ingredients in Heinz ketchup. While Heinz is the most popular ketchup brand in America, with 50 percent market share and an international presence in 140 countries, it’s clearly not the best choice for people who want to eat healthier.
Distilled Vinegar
Another troubling ingredient ranks number two on the Heinz ketchup ingredient list: distilled vinegar.
Distilled vinegar is great to use as a cleaning product for your bathroom or kitchen, but when consumed, it makes the body acidic. It can also cause hardening of the joints.
False advertising
In an effort to compete in today’s health-conscious food market, Heinz advertises its ketchup as “all-natural”. For this, Heinz was sued in a class-action suit for false advertising.
There’s little that’s natural about Heinz ketchup. The corn syrup is GMO, the tomatoes are dripping with pesticides and there’s nothing natural about the last item on the ingredient list: “natural flavors”.
Healthier ketchup alternatives
If you can’t live without ketchup, find a high-quality organic brand that uses a higher quality vinegar and no high fructose corn syrup. Or you can always make your own ketchup and control the amount of sweetener that goes in.
And don’t worry about becoming a high fructose corn syrup medical statistic because you’ve been eating Heinz ketchup since childhood. Your body is designed to clean itself out with a little support. That’s why cleansing is so important, it’s the support we all need to clean the toxic ingredients from processed food out of our system.
Doing a comprehensive cleanse, like the 21-Day Body Makeover, helps reset the body and reverse past damage. The 21-Day Body Makeover is not a punishing cleanse based on deprivation, it’s full of whole food nutrients to nourish your body and lighten your load.
Low Thyroid Function
If you struggle with the inability to lose weight, dry skin, fatigue, cold hand and feet, high cholesterol or constipation you may be experiencing the symptoms of low thyroid function.
The thyroid is the gland that controls metabolism, determining the speed at which the body uses food as fuel. If you suffer from a slow metabolism or weight loss resistance, balancing your thyroid hormones may fix the problem, making weight loss possible again. There’s also the added bonus of alleviating the symptoms mentioned above, as well as additional symptoms.
Food matters. A high sugar, low fat, calorie restricted diet can throw off thyroid function. This happens when you rob the body of the calories it needs and disrupt blood sugar balance.
To heal from this, the thyroid needs a diet high in nutrients with enough calories to stoke the metabolic fire.
These are also some of the fundamental food principles that the 21-Day Body Makeover program is based on.
These are the principles that will rebuild your metabolism and increase your energy. Healthy weight loss is not about deprivation and starvation. It’s about giving your body what it needs to thrive.
