When Health Food Is Unhealthy

The holidays can wreak havoc on a diet. If it's not the temptations — the desserts and rich foods — then it's being out of your element, staying with relatives who don't exactly share your perspective on health.

I go back home to Philadelphia, which in any given year is ranked the fattest city in America, save for when San Antonio or Miami wants a piece of the pie.

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Dried fruit: What could be healthier than fruit? Well, not dried fruit. I was gulping down handfuls of dried figs and apricots, while deriding those feasting on cholesterol-ridden shrimp and a dip so laden with fat that it could serve as window caulking. The problem with dried fruit is that there's no water to fill you up; you'll quickly lose track of how many pieces of fruit you're actually eating. Each handful — and there were surely more than a dozen — contained 50 to 100 calories, meaning I easily consumed a Big Mac's worth of calories.

Pumpkin seeds: Again, I got some magnesium, along with good ol' manganese and phosphorus. But seeds tend to be more calorie dense than nuts, with a cup of store-bought roasted squash or pumpkin seed kernels weighing in at nearly 1,200 calories. Fortunately I roasted whole seeds, which have about 300 calories per cup. My other consolation is that I burned a good deal of calories smashing open the pumpkin and scooping out the seeds.

The lesson here is that healthy foods are supposed to be a substitute in your diet, not a complement. Folks pour on the olive oil because it contains healthy fats, but they don't eliminate the unhealthy fats from red meats. Similarly, some people sprinkle ground flaxseed on just about everything because of the healthy omega-3 essential fatty acids. But fat has twice as many calories than protein or carbohydrates, so the carefree sprinkling can add up.

Christopher Wanjek is a Live Science contributor and a health and science writer. He is the author of three science books: Spacefarers (2020), Food at Work (2005) and Bad Medicine (2003). His "Food at Work" book and project, concerning workers' health, safety and productivity, was commissioned by the U.N.'s International Labor Organization. For Live Science, Christopher covers public health, nutrition and biology, and he has written extensively for The Washington Post and Sky & Telescope among others, as well as for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he was a senior writer. Christopher holds a Master of Health degree from Harvard School of Public Health and a degree in journalism from Temple University.