We all have a snack food that we find irresistible. I’ll confess mine – blue corn chips. What’s yours? If the answer is potato chips, French fries or sugary soda, beware. A new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Healthsays that eating even moderate amounts of these particular treats is likely to lead to a steady weight gain over the years, especially at midlife.
The study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, looks at the kind of creeping weight gain that many adults experience. It’s often so slow and gradual and you don’t know you’re gaining until you try to get into a piece of clothing that fit well just a few years earlier.
The researchers looked at three long-term studies that followed more than 120,000 men and women who were not obese when the studies began. After analyzing the data, they found that just one daily serving of potato chips was equal to an annual weight gain of 1.69 pounds while soda and processed and red meat led to an annual gain of a pound.
This doesn’t sound like much, but over the years, it adds up. And you’re not getting any nutritional value from chips or soda – so eating these things is also a lost opportunity to provide your body with the kinds of vitamins and antioxidants found in fruit, vegetables and whole grains.
Which brings us to the diet of the people in the study who did not gain weight much weight over the years. What did they eat? You guessed it: lots of the healthy stuff, especially vegetables, whole grains, fruit, nuts and yogurt.
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